If you’re a high school student, you can’t graduate without proving that you’ve done something to give back to the community.
All high school students in Ontario must perform 40 hours of community service before they are allowed to receive their diplomas.
Some, like Jelena Pavlovic, have no trouble completing those hours. The Grade 12 student at Kitchener-Waterloo Collegiate and Vocational Institute did most of her service by helping put on an annual community dinner at her school.
“It definitely made me see that I really like helping people out and interacting with others, instead of maybe an office job or something like that,” she says.
For Pavlovic’s classmate Hanne Kuhnert, chalking up 40 hours of giving back was even easier. She completed it in a week of volunteering at a summer camp – before she even started Grade 9.
Kufnert says she considered 40 hours of community service “such a miniscule thing to complete” and saw that they provided proof of qualities such as work ethic, dedication and good citizenship.
“Those are all things employers usually look for,” she says.
Given that, she’s surprised by how many of her peers she saw waiting until the final weeks of the school year to complete their hours.
KCI teacher Mike Jones was a little less surprised. As a woodworking teacher, he was used to helping students get their final hours by having them clean up the wood shop.
Now teaching a green industries course, Jones estimates that he’s helped a dozen students perform community service over the past week by helping him with weeding, spreading mulch, cleaning out the chicken coop and other outdoor chores.
“I put out the call … and I just had kids showing up,” he says.
“It’s kind of a win-win situation. We’re trying to help them out as best we can. We want the students to graduate too.”
Jones says some of the students who have come to him in the last few days have done so with none of their 40 hours completed.
According to the Waterloo Region District School Board, 800 students expected to graduate high school last year did not. Many of those students were what superintendent Ron DeBoer says many of those students were so-called “early leavers” – people who decided to leave the school system altogether.
About 80 per cent of the 800 students had not completed their 40 hours of community service. Typically, many of them were also missing required course credits.
“There are some students that need to be chased down a little bit,” DeBoer says.
“For a lot of students, they leave it until the end.”
DeBoer says school board officials are concerned about the number of students who do not complete their 40 hours, and are planning on implementing an electronic tracking system accessible to students, parents and staff members this fall.
