SAD 1 adds community service hours
as graduation requirement
By Scott Mitchell Johnson
PRESQUE ISLE — Beginning with next year’s freshmen, Presque Isle High School students will need to complete 40 hours of community service in order to graduate.
At the Feb. 15 SAD 1 board meeting, directors approved the plan which is becoming more common with today’s high schools.
“Throughout our state and country, the number of high schools requiring a community service component for graduation is steadily increasing,” said PIHS Principal Donna Lisnik. “Part of preparing students for responsible community membership is an awareness of the needs of that community.”
Lisnik said the state of Maine itself is a role model in terms of giving back as outlined in its 1994 Maine Commission for Community Service.
“Part of their program — their vision statement — cites the need to become an involved and responsible citizen. It refers to ‘harnessing the energy of a few to the benefit of many’ and calls service ‘a cornerstone of the educational process,’” she said. “The initiative refers to community service as an ‘exemplary vehicle for delivering educational content and assessing learning — and an educational aim in itself.’”
Lisnik told directors that one of the seven expectations listed in the district’s PIHS Core Values, Beliefs and Learning Expectations is that each student will “recognize the importance of participating in community activities.”
“There really is no way to assess that all of our students are involved — in some way — in contributing positively to the community,” she said, “so we started looking at ways that this might be improved, and we came up with a community service graduation requirement. There are several schools in our area that expect their students to complete so many hours of community service before they graduate, and I think it’s great for the kids to get out and contribute.”
Though all of the components aren’t in place yet, Lisnik said the school will form a committee of faculty and staff to determine “exactly how they want to set it up.”
“So far we know that we would like to have 40 hours, which would be 10 hours per year,” she said, “and that our homeroom teachers would be the ones to keep track of a students’ hours because they are with those students and make connections with them every day for four years.
“Our guidance department and other members of the faculty and staff will come up with ideas for the students, and the students will also be able to come up with their own ideas, as well. There will be criteria as to what will be considered a community service hour and what will not,” said Lisnik. “For example, I don’t think it’s fair for a student who always shovels his grandmother’s walk to be able to count that as a community service component. That’s just plain being a good grandchild. If a student is in a club or organization that requires community service such as the National Honor Society, they can’t double-dip. That is a requirement of that particular club or organization; it is not a graduation requirement and that’s very standard throughout states where they have these community service requirements.”
With the school board’s unanimous approval, the new initiative will be incorporated in the 2012-13 Program of Studies handbook.
