Pride in Service

With graduation only weeks away, Magruder High School senior Brent Rademacher had not even begun the 75 hours of community service required of every high school senior in the state. “I’m a procrastinator,” the college-bound athlete shrugged.

Finally, at the suggestion of his coach, Rademacher spent several weekends teaching swimming to disabled children training for the Special Olympics. He met a boy his own age he could share jokes with and little kids who were always excited to see him. What started as a requirement turned out to be a heart-opening experience that he plans to continue on his own. He learned, he said, that “It’s a good feeling helping someone out.”

Framers of Maryland’s unique statewide mandate--which, starting this month, denies diplomas to students who don’t serve 75 hours--would be pleased, but not completely. They see community involvement not merely as a way for youngsters to feel good about themselves, but as an integral way of helping to solve social problems.

“I wanted kids to think about why they’re doing service,” said Maryland Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, who five years ago led the campaign here. “In late 20th century America, we had very little language that articulated our duty to others, our responsibility as citizens to get involved. The only language we had was the language of self-fulfillment,” she said wryly.

Often citing a “tragic disconnection” between schools and communities, an estimated 30% to 40% of schools across the country are now trying various ways to attract, cajole or prod young people into community service.

In April, a new organization of dozens of social service and education groups called for model programs in 10,000 schools nationwide by next June.

In California--where officials estimate as few as 1 in 4 adults has any personal contact with young people outside media images--untold numbers of individual districts and schools already require service. The Los Angeles Unified School District is considering an hourly requirement for graduation. In Sacramento, legislators are considering a bill that would mandate at least the opportunity for all students to receive credit for service.

Contrary to popular perception, however, researchers say many students are already motivated to serve. What’s more, it’s unclear whether the school-based requirements are really making service meaningful. While some schools promote a strategy called “service learning,” teacher-led projects that teach academics through service, most call for a set number of hours, often providing students only with lists of outside agencies. Others do both.

So far, no other state has followed Maryland’s approach.

In Maryland, community service was mandated around the state, but training and support were not universally implemented, and every district was left to design its own program, said Marilyn Smith, former director of Maryland’s Commission on Service and now director of Learn and Serve America, a national service program. “Lots of educators were very enthusiastic,” she said. “Lots didn’t know what it was. Lots were not interested.”

For instance, a science teacher in Anne Arundel County teamed with a forester and helped students raise fish for testing in Chesapeake Bay. Others sent students to hospitals or museums where they slapped labels on mailers.

Some schools counted almost anything from participation in band or child development class, volunteering in a political campaign, writing a song--or watching Saturday morning cartoons. (In that case, the student was asked to count the number of violent acts in three hours of cartoons and reflect on violence and the media.)

Some counselors said they resented the additional time needed to cajole, even sometimes shame, students into completing the requirement (at one school, laggards’ names were read over the loudspeaker). “I think we do too much,” said a guidance counselor at Northwestern High in Prince George’s County. “I shouldn’t have to spend my time doing this.”

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When worse came to worst, workers from AmeriCorps, the national program that offers education awards in exchange for service, were available to call parents or drive students to their volunteer assignments, leading critics to complain the students were not learning to take responsibility. Some students said they were surprised to see they had received credit for service hours they hadn’t even realized they had earned.

And one principal cited political pressure to ensure the success of the service requirement, unlike the graduation requirements in academic subjects. Observed Magruder Principal Jack Graham, “They don’t come to us and say, ‘You make sure that kid passes algebra.’ ”

The notion of coerced volunteering remains contentious. Students and parents in New York, Pennsylvania and North Carolina have previously filed lawsuits to protest similar requirements in local jurisdictions, in some cases arguing the mandate amounted to slavery. The U.S. Supreme Court has supported the schools.

While Maryland has received no formal challenges, students there still protested the requirement as “involuntary servitude” or just “stupid.”

Nevertheless, with one week until all graduations are completed, officials in Maryland were already calling their approach a “tremendous success.” Some students had far surpassed the requirement, racking up hundreds of hours. One girl, Amber Coffman, 15, of Glen Burnie, has become a minor celebrity for forming her own nonprofit corporation, Happy Helpers for the Homeless, which packs and delivers 600 lunches every weekend to people living on the streets.

Less than 10 of the state’s 43,135 were denied diplomas because they ignored the requirement, said Luke Frazier, executive director of the Maryland Student Service Alliance, a public-private organization that supports the mandate. “We are extremely proud of what we’ve done in Maryland because, for the first time, diplomas that are going to be issued in the next couple of weeks represent not only academic achievement, but civic engagement as well,” he said.

Civic Duty

Civic engagement has a long tradition in the U.S., documented by 19th century French journalist Alexis de Tocqueville who noted in “Democracy in America” that no other country has used the “principle of association” as broadly to “enlarge the heart and develop the human mind.”

During the Depression, national legislation supported work programs, and, in the ‘60s, the Peace Corps was created under John F. Kennedy in a burst of civic optimism. Canned food drives and holiday singing in nursing homes have also been an informal part of elementary school education for nearly a century. In the ‘90s, that legacy has become increasingly institutionalized under presidents Bush and Clinton, who created the Corp. for National Service, which, with a budget of $616 million, runs the various AmeriCorps programs as well as funds for school-based service-learning programs.

Paraphrasing de Tocqueville, Lt. Gov. Townsend observed that in a democracy, a well-developed sense of community is required of citizens to counterbalance individualism and freedom, that, if unchecked, can lead to such problems as environmental pollution or protections for pornographers.

The eldest child of Robert F. Kennedy, Townsend said community service also has a long tradition in her own family, due partly to their Catholic education and partly to their immigrant experience. “At that time, government was not jumping in to help. We helped each other.”

Townsend has volunteered since she was a child, bringing holiday food to poor neighborhoods, making adobe bricks on Indian reservations. Her two eldest daughters have built gardens in inner cities, helped endangered turtles in Costa Rica and tutored children in Appalachia and the Dominican Republic.

Young people should not always expect the experience to be comfortable, she said, explaining how she has hand-mixed mud and manure on a reservation in New Mexico and felt the obvious resentment of a poor girl her age who once accepted her holiday turkey with a glare.

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Townsend contends that the uneven quality of Maryland’s service programs is no different from that of science or math classes anywhere. The approach, she said, has enabled thousands of students to experience the “joy of service” who never would have otherwise. Initial opposition, she added, has faded--often because children, and sometimes their parents, truly value getting involved.

Lily Raff, 17, a junior at Montgomery Blair High in Takoma Park, said she opposed the requirement in theory because it is unfair and sends the wrong message. “Students are not being rewarded if they do community service,” she said. “Instead they’re being punished if they don’t.” But she said she enjoyed volunteering in an animal clinic twice a week for a year. “It was great,” she said. “Really wonderful. I learned a lot and it heightened my interest in the field.”

Tiffany Clark, 18, president of the student government association at Suitland High School, outside Washington, volunteered at the blood bank at the National Institutes of Health. “The following summer they gave me a job. They wrote me a recommendation for college,” she said proudly.

Nikia Johnson, a senior at Northwestern High School had to scramble at the last minute to document the times she had helped at her cousin’s day-care center or at church with the elderly. A single mother who also worked for pay 30 hours a week at a clothing store, Johnson said volunteering was already a way of life she had learned from a churchgoing aunt who raised her.

Despite the other pressures in her life, she said she will continue to help the less fortunate: “No matter what’s going on in your life, you can thank God you’re not going through what they’re going through.”

Enthusiastic Kids

Researchers say widespread perceptions of cynical, uninvolved youth have been greatly exaggerated. According to national surveys, well over half of all teenagers are already involved in some form of volunteer activity, often through churches, said Alan Melchior, deputy director at the Center for Human Resources at Brandeis University.

Freshmen entering college last fall were considered the most community-service minded class in the history of UCLA’s 31-year nationwide survey of college freshmen. The rise in reported acts of volunteering can be traced partly to the new requirements, but the questionnaire also indicated a shift in attitude, said survey director Linda Sax.

While the more engaged attitudes seem to clash with previous surveys that showed rising cynicism, Sax said, “It’s starting to look like they are just turned off by politics, not by civic life. They’re equating politics with campaigns, with negative advertising rather than issues which they do care about.” The students are particularly concerned about children and interest in teaching as a career has hit a 25-year high, she said.

Melchior said that in his recent nine-state study of 10 high schools and seven middle schools that used service-learning programs, 95% of the high school students said they enjoyed their volunteer experience, but only 35% thought it should be required.

His study showed that established school-based service-learning programs can make a difference by reinforcing a whole range of positive attitudes, such as social responsibility and acceptance of cultural diversity.

The programs he studied were all linked to a formal curriculum, involved more than 30 hours of service and included written and oral reflection. “They were not telling kids to go out and do 40 hours,” Melchior said. Unfortunately, he said, many jurisdictions that are instituting hours requirements are not providing enough support. “A bad service experience can turn a kid off to volunteering,” he said.

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The first of its kind, the study lent support to another faction of service-learning promoters--education reformers who believe service is an effective strategy for motivating students academically.

Although still little known, “service learning” has particular potential in California where projects can bring together disparate groups of children now targeted in separate programs such as bilingual or migrant education, at-risk students and special or gifted education, said Andrew Furco, director of the Service Learning Research and Development Center in the UC Berkeley School of Education. Some of the most exemplary programs are taking place in Oakland and San Francisco.

In one, math students worked with engineers and seniors to build wheelchair access ramps. In a high school in Modesto, students researched and wrote their own bill to help solve a community problem they identified, a lack of bilingualism.

“At the end of a really good service-learning program, students will be able to tell you a whole lot more than it felt good,” said Learn and Serve’s Smith. “Maybe they won’t say, ‘It’s my duty to be a good citizen.’ But it might be, ‘Do you know a lot of sick people are left alone to rot in a nursing home? And that makes me feel bad.’ ”

In California and elsewhere, she said, many educators are backing off hourly requirements and, rather than putting the burden on students, are putting the burden on schools to design quality programs.

“We hope by the year 2000 that 25% of students will have the opportunity to engage in service learning. By 2004, we hope 50% have the opportunity,” said Mike Brugh, coordinator for the statewide program CalServe, which funnels federal funds to districts interested in service learning.

Still, questions remain: Will interested teachers be able to get support? Can they connect with communities they don’t live in? What if students choose, as they have, controversial or liability-prone projects such as volunteering in a gay rights demonstration or with AIDS patients? Can adults in the community relate to adolescents?

Making Connections

As the school year came to a close, some students at Suitland High put on a “seniors prom” for the folks who have been coming from an adult care center once a week to their community-service class.

Wearing plastic leis and surrounded by balloons, some of the elderly dozed off while young girls sang and recited poems. Others chatted with youngsters they’ve come to know. “I love this group. I love kids,” said Eleanor Boozer, 77, who has placed photos of two of the students at home on a shelf next to those of her family. Ayisha Ford, 17, said she learned that “Many of them are still young. They act like us. They’re funny, like comedians.”

In a corner, a group of boys sat apart. It wasn’t that they were uninterested, they said, they were simply more interested in an off-campus project of their own--a Rites of Passage group, one of the hundreds of Afrocentric youth groups that have sprung up nationwide. The boys said their particular group believes people of all races are brothers and sisters and promotes communication and respect for women.

Seeing a need for latchkey boys to play with one another after school without getting into trouble, members also teach basketball in the neighborhood. B.J. Roper, 17, said he could count the time spent with the boys for his school requirement, but he doesn’t, because “It’s too easy.”

Roper said he used to live a self-centered life in his former neighborhoods in Southern California and Virginia. It was Maryland’s friendlier climate that inspired him to change, he said. “People here take time out to know who you are,” he said. “Any normal-minded citizen would respond in a new way.”