As the school takes on new improvements over the years, it poses a threat of losing important defining characters and priceless experiences, such as community service.

St. Paul Academy and Summit School requires only 12 hours of community service as a sophomore. “Tenth graders complain about 12 hours, which is hardly anything over the course of the entire year. There are schools [the Upper School faculty] have looked at that have 100 hours over the course of [grades] 9-12, but there  are pros and cons,” sophomore grade class supervisor Molly Ward said.

“It’s not really a requirement. It’s an expectation,” Upper School Dean of Students Judy Cummins said.

“We don’t have the requirement because we think it’s going to create [only some] number of sophomores who volunteer. It’s just exposure to the sophomores, to see what’s out there and things they can do,” Ward said.

Sophomore Navodhya Samarakoon took the SPA requirement a few steps further. Samarakoon volunteered over the summer in the city of Anuradhapura in Sri Lanka, halfway across the globe, teaching English and engaging in activities with children who live with foster parents. “It’s a really nice setting [to volunteer in],” Samarakoon said.

“I think that it’s important for people to look outside their own lives and give what they can, or donate to their strengths in the greater community,” Ward said.

“It’s healthy for us,” Cummins said.

Samarakoon sees volunteering as  “the experience of helping someone.” Community service is more than just a form that says you’ve completed 12 hours with a signature on it. Senior Ben Morris has experienced two entirely different volunteering environments, and to him, the key difference was the motive. Morris volunteered in Goodwill and Woodwinds ER in Woodbury to fulfill the school requirement. He also volunteered later, on his own, in Guatemala, fixing cleft palats and hernias for people who cannot afford medical care.  “I think that people need to see a value in volunteering, not being forced to by some authority figure,” Morris said.

There’s a difference between volunteering with a purpose and volunteering for a signature on a paper, or to please colleges.“You can really see it if they [volunteer for colleges], because once they’re done with their 12 hours, they don’t do anything more,” Samarakoon said.

“Volunteering at goodwill for school was like pulling teeth to me,” Morris said.

“Any commitment talks about somebody’s passion,” Cummins said.

“There’s certainly people who started volunteering as tenth graders who keep doing it with the same organization through their senior year, and there are some people who barely get it done, and probably some people who get their cards signed even though they didn’t actually do what they said they did. It’s a mixed bag,” Ward said.

Samarakoon values the concept of making commitments with organizations when volunteering and writes letters to the children she taught in Sri Lanka. “I would love to [go back to volunteer again]. If I had to be nitpicky about one of my regrets in volunteering in a different country, it’s that you can’t [go back] every weekend,” Samarakoon said.

The importance of volunteering, and the effect it has on those who volunteer, is substantial. The sophomores were told about the effect volunteering has on people when they were freshmen, during the multiple informative sessions about sophomore volunteering requirements.  “People who’ve done a lot of service come back with a lot of different perspectives,” Cummins said, and for students who volunteer, this is experienced firsthand: “They told us this last year, but after volunteering, that’s so true,” Samarakoon said.

High school is where a lot of lifelong skills and habits are acquired, and developing a relationship with community service is imperative for these students. Every grade in SPA has an overarching theme, and sophomore year focuses on community service. But shouldn’t this idea be encouraged throughout the entire high school year? Juniors and seniors should also be told to keep volunteering with organizations they liked, that they experimented with sophomore year.

In the past, SPA used to have an individual on campus whose job was to connect the students with people in the community and help out. Some examples included teaching Spanish to St. Paul firemen and studying cancer prevention with the University of Minnesota. In both these scenarios, academics were linked to community service. This was also in part to the teachers’ responsibility to integrate this community work into the curriculum. It’s a pity that we don’t do this anymore, it would make for better context for the curriculum in addition to bettering the community.

To avoid losing the opportunity of exploring community service, SPA should grasp the preexisting requirement, and in fact, to make students more engaged and excited about building long lasting commitments to service, extend it to all four high school years as a whole, and raise the number of hours to at least a hundred. That’s 25 a year, and really not that hard. Increased requirements are obviously within reach if a student wishes to apply themselves to what they are doing. It also does not interfere with classes or budget problems, so I don’t see any reason not to put this into action. Students will gain from it and enjoy it, and even if they don’t enjoy it, I guarantee that their contribution will have made their community a better place.