By Meredith Dundas
Attention students: If you’re entering Grade 9 in 1999 you will be sentenced to 40 hours of community service.
Earlier this year, Education Minister Dave Johnson announced changes to Ontario’s high school curriculum. The changes include 40 hours of mandatory community service to “promote responsible citizenship.”
This requirement should boost the 1994 statistics that report one in four youths was voluntarily involved in community or school projects. But they were volunteers — their diploma wasn’t on the line, says Katherine Scott of the Canadian Council on Social Development.
Students will now have to serve community service before they can graduate. It won’t count as a credit towards graduation and the work shouldn’t be done during school hours.
The changes don’t sit well with Larry Capstick, Ottawa president of the Ontario Secondary School Teachers Federation. He is sending out surveys to parents and teachers to examine their concerns.
Capstick says students shouldn’t be forced into community service. “How do you impose volunteerism? It’s hard enough to find placements for co-op students now.”
Larry Diachun, education officer for the secondary school project, says people shouldn’t oppose these changes. “This was not meant to create a hardship…we decided on a 40-hour recommendation so as not to make it onerous,” says Diachun.
He says the community service works out to one hour a month, over the four years the student is in high school.
Diachun says the community service isn’t included as a credit because the government wants students to do this as “good citizens.”
“You don’t do this to get a pay-off,” says Diachun.
But the fact remains that a diploma will not be granted unless they are ‘good citizens’. Graduation is the reward a student receives.
The community service doesn’t have to be done for charity organizations, instead the placements could be for personal interest or experience for the future.
Diachun says the discussions for reform began in 1995. They were prompted by the Royal Commission on Learning in 1994 and furthered by a 1997 report from the Advisory Board on the Voluntary Sector.
Both these reports recommended that the government should develop citizenship programs that increase youth participation.
Paula Speevak, the executive director at the Volunteer Centre of Ottawa-Carleton sat on one of 26 committees that advised the ministry about the reforms.
Although their idea wasn’t to force community service onto students without course credit, they said community involvement is important and should complement classroom learning.
One problem Speevak sees is time constraints. For some volunteer placements, such as the Distress Centre in Ottawa, there is a 56-hour training requirement. Those places won’t be an option, unless the student volunteers more of his or her own time.
Speevak also says if a student was visiting an elderly person, it would be unfair to build a rapport only to leave when the 40 hours was up.
Diachun replies to this problem by saying “that’s a concern that’s being explored.” He says once students are involved in discussions they can come up with more placement ideas of their own. The community service doesn’t have to be done for charity organizations, instead the placements could be for personal interest or experience for the future.
There will also be a class in the new curriculum called Civics and Career studies that should help students with their community service decisions.
But right now, some students aren’t happy with the government’s decision to make their diploma contingent upon community service. Although Grade 11 student Jan Dutkiewicz’s diploma doesn’t depend on community service he questions why it would be required. He says he already has a paying job that gets him involved in the community. “I’m busy anyway, it would just get in the way.”
But another Grade 11 student at Lisgar, Ivo Entcher, has a different reaction.
“I think it’s great. It gives you experience and can help students to further their public relations skills.
“Second, it’s giving something back to the community, the government is paying for your education, so you should give something back in return,” he says.
Entcher already volunteers by teaching soccer for two hours a week at the Lorry Greenberg Community Centre.
But for those students who aren’t already involved in the community, they might want to decide where they want to spend 40 hours because, Diachun says, “at the moment, the policy stands.”