EDUCATION : Fight Over Community Service Mandate Goes From Classroom to Courtroom

Maintaining a good academic average just isn’t enough to graduate nowadays in a growing number of high schools across the nation.

Students now have to do time--time in nursing homes and nature preserves, food banks and homeless shelters.

In the past several years, an increasing number of school districts have made community service a requirement for receiving a diploma. Proponents of the plans say they believe that they are necessary to counter a decline in civic values among many members of the MTV generation.

“Community service work is crucial for American youth,” said David Sawyer, director of Students for Appalachia, a community service program at Kentucky’s Beria College. “It develops people who understand citizenship as problem-solving and taking responsibility in your community and your country.”

Not everyone agrees.

For Daniel Immediato, 17, an 11th-grader at Rye Neck High School in Mamaroneck, N.Y., the issue is one of money. “I didn’t really want to work for free,” he said.

Aric Herndon, 14, a ninth-grader at Chapel Hill High School in North Carolina, already considers himself a full-fledged volunteer. He often performs community work through his Boy Scout activities. But his high school contends earning badges is a form of payment--thus a form of personal benefit. The two students, with their different perspectives, are united by two separate lawsuits they filed against their school districts to challenge community service requirements for graduation.

“It’s fine for public schools to say: ‘We don’t care if you don’t do algebra ever again, but we want you to learn the skills now.’ But with community service it’s different,” said Scott Bullock, an attorney for the Institute of Justice, the Washington-based libertarian organization sponsoring the federal court suits. “Students are being forced to go out into the community and provide free labor for other individuals or organizations.”

The institute contends that mandatory community service violates the Constitution’s 13th Amendment prohibition against involuntary servitude as well as the due process provisions of the 14th Amendment, which the group maintains gives parents the right to direct their children’s education.

Immediato and Herndon are not the first opponents of forced community service plans to be represented by the institute. The group previously assisted Lynn Steirer, a student from Bethlehem, Pa. Federal courts denied Steirer’s position, and the Supreme Court refused last year to hear an appeal. But the institute is hoping that the more recent cases will force the high court to alter its position.

The students are swimming against a powerful tide. A survey this year by the Educational Research Service found more than 30% of U.S. public and private high schools, including the Laguna Beach Unified and Saddleback Valley Unified school districts, either require community service or plan to implement it within the next year.

The movement received a boost in 1992 when the Maryland State Board of Education voted to require 75 hours of community service from all public high school students in the state.

Many in the nonprofit sector support the programs, seeing it as a way to gain volunteers and a chance to sway young minds.

Educators believe students gain valuable learning experience from volunteer work. They say students benefit from being expected to contribute to their communities as well as from exposure to different kinds of people. “They give our students the skills they need to be successful in their personal lives beyond school,” said Rahima Wade, a University of Iowa education professor.

At Rye Neck High School, students perform their service duties through a class called Managing Your Future. “You read a lot today about schools not doing a good job of preparing students for the transition from school to work,” said Phyllis Jaffe, the lawyer representing the school.

“A program which does require an application for a job, working for 10 hours a year for four years outside of the classroom, how to deal with people, dress, be on time, and make a commitment and stick with it--this is part of the transition school districts have been accused of not doing well.”

But there are dissenters within the education Establishment.

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“Voluntary dedication is an important factor in motivating people to participate in public life, and when you make something mandatory, you lose or undermine the feeling,” said Reed Ueda, an associate professor of American history at Tufts University in Massachusetts. “In the end, while it may seem like a cure to the decline of civilization, it may actually lead to a weakening.”

Many students say they have mixed feelings about the programs. On a recent day, Cord Chase, 18, took a 15-minute break from building a butterfly haven at New York’s Rye Nature Preserve to explain his position.

Chase, a senior at Rye High School, supports the program. He says that since he’s been volunteering at the nature preserve, he’s more environmentally aware and he’s stopped littering.

“I look forward to coming here. I know it sounds corny, but it isn’t. It gives me something to do after school, and it keeps my mom off my back,” he said.