Students across the county earn student service learning hours for talking to adults about 9/11, interviewing the elderly about World War II and writing imaginary letters to President Obama. Sadly, these aren’t humorous examples of how slacker students cheated the system to get easy SSL hours. These are examples of the school assignments that students get as part of the curriculum in seventh, eighth and ninth grade that amount to almost half of their total SSL requirement.

MCPS should stop giving students hours for in-school projects. Furthermore, MCPS should encourage SSL coordinators to be more discerning about which activities count for SSL. This would encourage all students to earn their hours in ways that more meaningfully help the community.

Student service learning is supposed to address community needs and connect to curriculum goals, according to the MCPS website. It gives students the opportunity to impact their community positively by donating their time to worthy causes like volunteering at a food bank or cleaning up trash on the Potomac.

Current SSL guidelines merely state that service activities must be for a non-profit, address a community need and have adult supervision. The activity must either help a pre-approved organization or be an independent project approved by an SSL coordinator.

But it’s too easy for students to manipulate the system and “earn” their full 75 hours for activities that don’t require real effort and don’t fulfill any community needs. Requiring students to get a certain amount of hours through pre-approved organizations would ensure that every student contributes a part of their hours to a worthwhile cause.

Furthermore, schools should stop giving 35 hours of SSL throughout middle and high school for in-class projects that fail to address any real community needs. Seventh graders earn ten SSL hours for interviewing someone who lived through WWII about their experiences and then making a classroom presentation about what they learned; eighth graders earn another ten hours for interviewing people about 9/11. These assignments are good school projects that increase students’ awareness of our collective history, but listening to old folks reminisce doesn’t help the community the way raising money for a worthy charity would.

Students taking NSL in high school earn another 15 ineffectual service hours writing a letter to the president, which they don’t actually have to send, advising him on policy issues. It doesn’t matter if a student writes one million imaginary letters to the president; that student could better serve the community volunteering for an hour at the neighborhood soup kitchen.

What’s more, it doesn’t take 15 hours to write a letter. MCPS allows kids to earn far more credit than their work deserves by giving over-generous amounts of hours for school SSL assignments.

School projects have nothing to do with community service, yet they satisfy almost half of students’ SSL requirements, leaving only 40 more hours for the student to complete outside of school. MCPS should remove these flimsy SSL hours attached to in-school service projects and force students to involve themselves in more meaningful projects.