Demanding good deeds breeds performance anxiety - students and families who are challenging requirements to perform voluntary community services

Insight on the News, August 15, 1994 by Eric Felten

Aric Herndon is a model of the sort of youthful community service worker that has been touted by presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton and other advocates of civic involvement and charity. A volunteer at the thrift shop run by the Chapel Hill, N.C., Parent-Teacher Association, the 14-year-old has donated his time and sweat to build split-log benches for a local nature trail. So it would seem that before even beginning his sophomore year at Chapel Hill High School this fall, Herndon would have completed the 50 hours of community service that the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Board of Education requires for graduation. But according to the board's rules, Herndon's work doesn't count as true community service because he received compensation: Boy Scout merit badges and his Eagle Scout rank.

"They say I'm receiving a benefit by getting merit badges and Boy Scout ranks," says Herndon. "But isn't it also a benefit to get a diploma for community service?"

Frustrated with the rules that disqualify his scouting activities and with the very concept of required service, Herndon and his parents joined a lawsuit with another student, John Reinhard III, challenging the constitutionality of the board's edict. They claim that by making students give away their labor without compensation, the board has run afoul of the 13th Amendment -- adopted immediately after the Civil War to end slavery -- which out-laws involuntary servitude.

The students are being represented by the Institute for Justice, a libertarian public-interest law firm that also is challenging a mandatory community-service program on behalf of students Daniel Immediato and Mario Gironda Jr. of Rye Neck High School in Mamaroneck, N.Y. Nor are these the first such lawsuits: The Institute for Justice represented three Bethlehem, Pa., teenagers who, though involved in a variety of volunteer activities, objected to their schools' required service programs. The students lost early this year in federal circuit court -- the judges ruled that the service wasn't involuntary servitude because the students could always drop out if they wished -- and the Supreme Court declined to take up the case.

But as mandatory community-service programs proliferate in schools across the country (according to the Educational Research Service, one quarter of America's public schools already impose a volunteering requirement and another 10 percent of school districts plan to prescrie community-service responsibilities within the year), the lawsuits are proliferating as well. Institute for Justice lawyer Scott Bullock says he hopes that if enough cases are argued in enough jurisdictions, the justices will decide to weigh in. "However you look at it," says Bullock, "kids are being forced to give away free labor."

Although the students in these cases share a legal strategy, the more striking similarity is their universal bewilderment about the notion that volunteerism can be required. "They call it mandatory volunteering," says Herndon, "but I don't think it's volunteering if it's mandatory." David Moralis, one of the Bethlehem students, echoes Herndon's argument that required volunteering is a contradiction in terms, adding that once community service becomes a chore to fulfill graduation requirements, the satisfaction that comes from giving time and effort freely is lost. "When people are forced to serve," says Moralis, "it takes the fun out of it. If it's required, you don't feel like you're giving anything."

Like Moralis, the other Bethlehem students behind the Pennsylvania lawsuit, Lynn Steirer and Rachel Galassi, are active volunteers. Steirer, for example, gives her time to Meals on Wheels and works at a nursing home and participates in Girl Scout projects. Though they lost their legal challenge, the three seniors refused, on principle, to submit their community-service work for school credit and were denied diplomas by their schools, Liberty High and Freedom High. In June, they held an alternative graduation ceremony at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Bethlehem to mark the end of their high school years. The three will take the General Educational Development, or GED, tests in late summer to earn high school equivalency diplomas and are scheduled to start classes at state colleges in the fall. Moralis says he is disappointed that it all turned out this way, but he has no regrets.

The questions Herndon and Moralis pose -- whether required community service provides the same satisfaction as charitable acts and whether a mandatory program can be called volunteering -- illuminate a dividing line in the ongoing national debate about community service. Is the job of government to inspire people to give their energies and money to causes in which they believe -- as with Bush's "Thousand Points of Light"? Or should the government enforce the responsibilities of citizenship through a sort of Swiss-style national service program that drafts youth into publicservice programs? Or perhaps there exists some middle ground, as with Clinton's GI Bill approach, in which students earn cash for college by devoting a couple of years to community service.