As we know, students of Annandale High School find that doing their community service hours is a requirement for graduation. Students ask this question “ Why is community service hours important to do?”. Well there are benefits like volunteering in organizations and programs because it increases overall life satisfaction, helps you feel good about yourself, and being helpful to others. Doing community service hours isn’t that hard, there are after school clubs and outside of school activities to find and get those service hours.

There is this after school club called “Green Atoms”, it’s a club that always have community service hour opportunities for students of 9th-12th grade. They hold events like the Trellis Project, Ossian Hall Park clean ups, bake sales, and car washes, these give you more hours if you attend into one of these events. This club has membership fees, $10 without t-shirt and $15 with a t-shirt. If you pay one of the fees, then you become a member and try to get enough community service hours. The Green Atoms meet every Wednesday after school, mostly they do recycling, go around into teachers classrooms to collect plastic bottles and other trash. This is a good opportunity to earn service hours.

Another way to earn hours is when juniors and seniors get emails from Ms. Roth at the AHS Career Center, she sends information about college visits, SAT and ACT test preps, volunteering opportunities to earn service hours, and Financial aid and FAFSA completion workshops. You can find those opportunities in this website called “x2VOL”. Students can find and volunteer into any organizations and events, those are being held into schools, churches, clubs, and centers. Volunteering can be interesting to seniors because they know that there are more organizations and clubs to volunteer in 4 year universities. Opportunities are listed on x2VOL and fliers posted everywhere in the school hallway.

Although community service is important and those two ideas are great opportunities to earn hours for graduation. Also it is required in US VA Government classes because service is included as part of the school experience. When it’s near the end of each quarter, all government teachers check every senior’s community service on x2VOL and see how many hours they’ve done so far.  For all grades, you must have full 20 hours of community service to graduate from high school. The service learning cord is 40 hours and the Civics seal is 50 hours. If you complete one of those or both, it will be on your diploma on the day of graduation. Some seniors are trying to earn those rewards, but they just gotta keep volunteering until it is reached to the minimum service point. Some say that those two are hard to reach because it is a lot of hard work and they are achievements for them. Students can find something to become a volunteer like doing park cleanups, gardening, and hosting events. Hope the seniors get into volunteering