Selective Service

Nearly everyone agrees that requiring students to perform at least 60 hours of ‘service learning’ is worthwhile. But in Montgomery County, service learning requirements are implemented unevenly from school to school, and some students perform work that seems to skirt the intent of the program

By Julie Rasicot

When he was a freshman, Montgomery Blair High School student Adam Yalowitz devoted hundreds of hours to organizing fellow students to help the successful election campaign of Board of Education candidate Valerie Ervin.  

Fifteen-year-old Corey Goldstone, a student at Walter Johnson High School, spent last summer volunteering at Bethesda Cares, helping out in its soup kitchen and with other services that the community outreach program offers the homeless.

Blair junior Abe Schwadron has spent dozens of hours coaching a Takoma Park youth basketball team on which his younger brother plays.

And Albert Einstein High School student Mary Jeanne Harwood, now a junior, traveled with her church youth group to Georgia to spend a week repairing housing for poor people.    

What do the four students have in common?  For their efforts, they all received credit toward the state-mandated requirement that students, beginning in middle school, earn at least 60 hours of student service learning (SSL) in order to receive a high school diploma.

For these teenagers, who each already has easily surpassed the graduation requirement through a variety of service work, earning the hours was not difficult, especially once they discovered that their activities were approved for credit by the school system.

“It was amazing how much I was able to learn and how much fun I had,” Yalowitz, now a junior, says of his campaign experience, which sparked a growing interest in political activism. “And when it was over, I got all of these [SSL] hours.”

“For me, it’s definitely a really easy thing to do, especially with basketball, something that I was going to do anyway, regardless of whether I get credit,” says Schwadron of Silver Spring.

But not every student finds it so easy to earn the hours or even cares whether the hours they do earn are spent doing something meaningful. For these students, there is no point to student service learning, no grand ideal about learning about oneself while helping the community.  

“You don’t do it to try to serve the community. You try to get it over with. It’s a complete waste of time,” said a Walter Johnson junior as she hung out recently with friends after school.    

“How does it help us at all?” added sophomore Kevin Gallun, who was also in the group outside the Bethesda school.   

Keenan Brown, a Walter Johnson junior who earned 80 hours one summer as a camp counselor in training, has a slightly different take from his friends. “In a way, it’s good to help the community, but it shouldn’t be required to graduate. You should do it on your own.”  

Nearly 14 years after Maryland became the first state to mandate service learning participation as a condition of high school graduation, the county’s program is well entrenched. But it continues to experience growing pains as school officials grapple with inconsistencies in the way service learning, a teaching strategy that links service to classroom instruction, is defined and credited at schools throughout the district.

And there’s a growing administrative burden borne by those school staffers designated as SSL coordinators. The coordinators, who hold other jobs such as guidance counselor or media specialist, are allotted one hour per day to offer guidance on service opportunities and to process forms.  

School officials tout efforts in recent years to improve service learning by eliminating inconsistencies in the way it’s implemented, but acknowledge that change comes slowly, especially in a school system of more than 75,000 middle and high school students.

“It really is evolving with the charge from the state to make it quality and, locally, to make it meaningful and consistent,” says Pam Meador, SSL specialist for Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS). 

Traditionally, SSL combines “meaningful service to the community” with classroom learning, according to Learning in Deed, a national initiative supported by the National Service-Learning Partnership.  

It includes three phases: preparation, in which the student identifies a need; action, in which the student performs a specific activity; and reflection, in which the student writes about what he/she learned.  

The action can be face-to-face, such as serving food at a soup kitchen; provide no direct contact with recipients of the service, such as conducting a clothing drive; or be a form of advocacy, in which a student supports a social or political issue. 

Furthermore, state education officials say that all SSL experiences should meet the following seven criteria: meet a recognized community need, achieve curriculum objectives, include reflection about the experience, develop student responsibility, establish community partnerships, involve preparation, and equip students with knowledge and skills needed for the service activity.   

Julie Ayers, SSL specialist for the Maryland State Department of Education, says state officials developed the seven best practices after recognizing problems in how school districts were implementing the action phase of service learning. “Sometimes, people were doing a simulation instead of meeting an actual need,” she says. For example, a class might study homelessness and then write a letter about possible solutions instead of actually helping people, she says.   

Service learning “really should be service” and fit into the categories of health, education, environment and public safety, Ayers says. “It should be reaching outside the needs of a particular student. They’re educating others, not only themselves. That really is the intent.”    

Advocates say service learning takes community service to a deeper level, adding accountability, responsibility and education to volunteer work. But achieving that ideal can be elusive, especially when applied to teenagers whose lives are already overloaded with activities.   

Making sure kids understand and appreciate the meaning of service learning is a goal for Linda Potter, a Chevy Chase mother of five who has been a strong advocate of infusing service learning in the elementary grades. She has joined other parents in looking into the issue in the Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School (B-CC) cluster. Her daughter, Carrie, is a third-grader at Somerset Elementary School, which is the only county school that has incorporated service learning into its curriculum for kindergarten through fifth grade.

“What we found at the high school level is that kids do it for the requirement, and it’s not always meaningful engagement,” says Potter, who also has children at Westland Middle School and B-CC. “If it’s something they grow up with from kindergarten and understand why contributing is so critical, it would be more natural” for them to continue.

Inconsistency a problem

The biggest problem with the SSL program, parents, students and school officials say, is that it is administered inconsistently from school to school. For example, the state’s goal is to have all service learning connected to the classroom, but that’s not always the case. In middle schools, for example, students earn a total of 30 hours for completing sixth-grade science, seventh-grade English and eighth-grade history—courses that are supposed to include a service project, but often don’t. 

Middle school students and parents say they are often mystified when they see service hours listed on report cards, leading some students to think they got the hours automatically for passing a course.  “Sometimes, in my [eighth-grade] history class, I didn’t know how I got my hours,” says Anna Leary, a Richard Montgomery High School junior from Rockville, who also serves on a service learning advisory board created by MCPS Superintendent Jerry Weast. “I didn’t really do anything or I didn’t know if I’d get them or not. But I did.”

“The problem was that until recently, students were not monitored well,” says Mark Samara, sixth-grade counselor and SSL coordinator at Julius West Middle School in Rockville. “Students were getting their hours and couldn’t figure out how they got them.”

Meador, the MCPS SSL coordinator, has targeted the middle school issue with the help of the advisory board. As a result, MCPS this fall will require all middle schools to institute new curriculum with specific SSL projects in sixth-grade science, seventh-grade English and eighth-grade history. For example, the sixth-grade science class will examine the effect of people on the environment by conducting activities that explore the sources of runoff into the Chesapeake Bay. “Parents will be notified in writing, in advance, of these activities so that parents know what’s going on,” Meador says.

The easy way out

Because middle school students earn 30 SSL hours by passing required courses, most high school students need only earn another 30 hours to graduate. But high school students must take the initiative to find SSL opportunities—and, as many parents know, many students look for the easy way out.

High school students can earn their remaining hours through school projects; activities with school-sponsored organizations or with pre-approved nonprofit organizations; through several elective courses; and by helping out at school.

To help students find meaningful and appropriate SSL experiences, some high schools offer structured, in-house SSL programs for their students. For example, Walter Johnson has a Designated Hitter program, in which some 200 students earn SSL hours by volunteering in classrooms and working one-on-one with students, as well as working with peer counseling and mediation. “We feel it’s a real good use of hours,” says WJ service learning coordinator Vivian Griffin “...Students listen to each other.”

Many Maryland school districts require students to earn all their hours through coursework that includes service learning activities, but MCPS allows students to also earn hours through approved independent service learning projects, such as working in a homeless shelter or nursing home.

But administering the independent projects is difficult. “It’s very tricky,” says Ayers of the state education department. “It’s challenging for a system to do independent projects because you really need a structure in place to connect those projects back to the classroom. It’s great to work in a soup kitchen, but there should be some intensive, concentrated effort to tie it back to the classroom. That’s what we’re aiming at.” 

MCPS partners with the Montgomery County Volunteer Center to provide a list of approved agencies that offer service opportunities. The list can be accessed through the school system’s SSL Web site at www.mcpsssl.org. Agencies must be approved by Meador’s office before accepting students; those that aren’t providing the proper experience and guidance for students can be removed from the list.

Meador and others note that whether students are serving soup at a homeless shelter or filing attendance reports in the school office, their site supervisor must make sure the experience meets the SSL criteria. “The onus is on that adult to prepare the kid and tell them what the issues are and how the services are meeting that need,” she says. 

Laura Brecheen, director of volunteer services at Brooke Grove Retirement Village in Sandy Spring, says she works with interested students to determine the best fit, whether that’s serving meals to residents or using computer skills. “Part of our commitment to students is we give them an experience here and we want them to treat that experience as a job,” she says.  

Students also can propose their own service activities, but getting approval can become a cumbersome process when it’s left to an SSL coordinator to decide whether the activity meets the criteria for service learning.

Jennifer Hughes of Bethesda recalls the frustration she felt when she tried to get service learning credit for her son after he volunteered at a neighborhood summer camp. After jumping “through hoops” to get approval, she found that she had to “go through the same exact hoops” the next school year after he again worked at the camp.  

“They make it unnecessarily difficult for kids. There’s so much bureaucratic hoop jumping,” says Hughes, whose son, Ben, is in eighth grade at Thomas W. Pyle Middle School in Bethesda. “If a parent doesn’t pay strict attention [to] all these rules, [Ben] wouldn’t have gotten approval.”

Alexandra Fairfield went through a similar situation a few years ago when she says it took six months to get SSL credit for the time that her son, Alex, now a Westland eighth-grader, spent teaching chess to elementary school students. The issue: the lessons weren’t funded by the PTA, so they weren’t a pre-approved service activity.

“I said, ‘Wait a minute, you’re giving SSL credit to a kid serving popcorn at the school fair? My son is teaching chess for six months. Why is that not student service learning?’” says Fairfield, who lives in Silver Spring. She adds that the availability of the list of approved activities has helped reduce confusion over what kinds of activities will receive credit.

Overworked coordinators

Making decisions about what qualifies as an SSL activity is only one part of the multifaceted job of the service learning coordinator. Madeline Yates, a former regional coordinator for service learning with the state education department, notes that the county schools made a significant improvement in recent years by financing a full-time position to oversee the service learning program as well as funding part-time coordinator positions in all middle and high schools. 

“It is a radical difference in the amount of accountability that you can acquire back from schools. I commend Montgomery County for that,” says Yates, who serves on the MCPS service learning advisory board.

Coordinators, who must keep track of hundreds of students, spend much of their time processing application and verification forms, especially at the end of marking periods. The total number of hours that students have earned is recorded on their report cards. The verification forms, which include a reflection statement in which students are supposed to explain what they learned and how their service met a community need, can be especially time consuming, coordinators say.   

Because reflection on service work is a main component of service learning, coordinators say they try to make sure that students don’t just shrug it off with a few sentences. “One-sentence answers just don’t cut it for me,” Walter Johnson’s Griffin says. “I like a paragraph to really answer the question about what they did and what did they gain.”

Coordinators say it’s nearly impossible to get the job done in the five hours per week they get paid for. So they often find themselves putting in extra hours after school to keep up with the paperwork.

“We are aware that high schools have grown in enrollment and kids are more involved in service, and there’s more and more paperwork,” Meador says.  

Debra Wylie, a community activist whose youngest son is a junior at B-CC, says she found through her three children’s experience with service learning that better monitoring is needed to make sure that goals are met. “I’ve heard from other students that they might go to do the [SSL hours] and not do the time they’re supposed to be doing and get credit, which to me is not really teaching kids the true meaning of the program,” she says. “Lots of times, when kids are getting ready to graduate, they’re just running to these places, ‘Can you give me these hours?’”   

When it comes to fulfilling the SSL requirement, both parents and administrators agree that students will be students: If they’re interested, they’ll get involved; if not, service learning becomes just another chore, like doing homework.

Darcy Sullivan, a junior at Walter Johnson, has earned 194 hours by teaching children in a preschool program at her school as part of her child development classes and by participating in the Designated Hitter program last fall. Although she enjoyed the experiences, Sullivan says she probably wouldn’t have bothered to earn as many hours if she hadn’t been interested in taking the classes. “I do it because I like it, not because of the hours,” she says.   

But B-CC junior Micaiah Wylie-Forth says he knows students who earn their hours at school through such activities as participating in a class play, as he did, or helping the janitor collect recyclable materials. “Lots of kids say it is the easy way to get hours done. Once they get their hours, they’re done. It’s not necessarily always fun,” he says. “No one wants to do this to graduate.”

Although hundreds of opportunities are available, some students put off earning service hours until the last minute, and then look for the quickest way to finish. Even so, failure to meet the SSL requirement is rarely the reason a student doesn’t graduate; often, there are academic issues as well, school officials say.

Griffin says that usually about 20 percent of the seniors at Walter Johnson spend the year scrambling to earn hours in time to graduate. And that’s the time that parental involvement really accelerates, she and other coordinators say.

“Parents are calling, faxing, e-mailing,” Griffin says. As if to prove her point, a parent of a senior who still needs to earn 20 hours stops by to find out about service opportunities for her son. “I heard he can’t graduate without 20 credits. I was scared,” says the Bethesda mother.   

As of December, 17,857 of the county’s 45,285 high school students had met the service learning requirement. More than 6,900 of the nearly 10,500 seniors had earned at least 60 hours.

Above and beyond

Students who earn 260 hours or more by graduation are eligible to receive a Certificate of Meritorious Service from MCPS and the state education department. As of December, 2,364 high school students had already qualified for this award. Some students earn more than the minimum because they enjoy participating in community activities; others do so to try to impress college admission officials.  

Parent Mindy Lieberman of Bethesda says that earning the meritorious service award is “on a lot of parents’ and kids’ minds” because they’ve heard that colleges like to see it on applications. “It drives kids to do hours that they might not necessarily do, which is a good thing,” says Lieberman, mother of WJ freshman Corey Goldstone. “Perhaps it’s not always community- minded—it is something that’s part of the college process.”

“…[K]ids who are just meeting the requirement are just meeting the requirement,” says Margie Geisler, SSL coordinator at Walt Whitman High School. “But the kids who are really into service are doing many more hours than required. I think they feel that they are really helping the community,” 

“A lot of kids don’t file the paperwork,” adds Luana Zimmerman, coordinator at Winston Churchill High School in Potomac. “They’re doing it in the real spirit of it.”      

Julie Rasicot is a freelance writer and editor who lives in Silver Spring.