Community service has long proven to be a beneficial component of a student’s high school experience. Within the high school, such service opportunities are not hard to find. Key Club requires thirty hours of community service to obtain and hold onto membership. National Honor Society, which is available only to juniors and seniors who meet GPA and leadership requirements, requires twenty hours to retain membership. These organizations, hypothetically, provide a wonderful opportunity for students to exit the bubble of such an affluent community and help others.

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Yet, you have to wonder whether these groups deserve such a pristine reputation. If the hours which students consider community service hold true value, then I believe that their reputation is well deserved. However, this is often not the case.

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I believe I must define value before continuing. Valuable hours, in my mind, are hours that students spend using their privilege to help others. In a community as fortunate as Wellesley, we should be using our time to help those in impoverished areas. Certainly helping out around Wellesley is important, but helping out in communities where our students could make a huge difference should be higher on our list of priorities.

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Many of the hours available to students in Key Club and NHS take place in Wellesley or the surrounding towns. These communities certainly are in need of volunteer work, especially to run the various fairs at elementary schools or help out at the library. However, these shouldn’t be the only hours of service that students take part in. Many other pressing issues surround the Wellesley community, and they could use some attention.

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Consider, for example, the issue of homelessness. In regards to this issue alone, students could help. It is not as though Wellesley is in an isolated area. We are only twenty minutes outside of Boston, a city which had a twelve percent increase in homelessness from 2016 to 2017. Why are efforts not directed towards these individuals? Worcester is only forty minutes away. This city possesses a homeless population of 1100, children included. Perhaps, every so often, students should help out these children instead of those at the elementary school fairs.

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We cannot argue that we don’t have the capability to help those who truly need it. Seeing as Wellesley is an affluent community, funds could certainly be raised to provide transportation for students into the areas in which service would take place. Or, perhaps, upperclassmen could provide rides. After all, students drive themselves to most of the service events within Wellesley and the surrounding towns.

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One final part of the problem, which needs to be addressed, is the fact that students often get credit for service hours in which they don’t truly do much work at all. NHS and Key Club solidify the status of students’ membership according to whether or not they complete service hours. While handing out raffle tickets or selling snacks at an event qualifies as ‘doing something’, it doesn’t hold the same value as handing out items at a food pantry, picking up trash to help the environment, or raising money for a good cause. Should membership really be based on whether a student was able to help out in their own town? Or should we ask them to use their privilege to help others around the Wellesley area? I side with the latter case.

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The point here is not to attack any of the organizations responsible for helping students do community service. Rather, the goal is to help the high school move towards providing students with more valuable experiences. We shouldn’t be completing service hours just to stay in a club so that we can put it on our college applications. We should be doing community service because we want to help those who need it. Increasing the value of service hours will weed out those who are fearful of putting in hard work and doing service for the right reasons. And, most importantly, it will allow students to help a greater range of people in trying circumstances.