Dear Principal,

I don't think your students should be required to take part in community service for a number of reasons.

First, and most importantly of all, community service during school hours would be a distraction to the education needed in the school.

Since the students have a certain time that they are allowed to be held at the school, it would be impossible to have a time of community service, as well as the regular, daily curriculum.

This is an example of why community service should not be required at your school.

Since it is very hard to find a job right now, a student would need all the education he or she can get.

If you took an hour away from a class every day, and there are 180 days in a school year, requiring community service would take away 180 hours from their regular education.

In that entire class that was taken away from them, here are some examples on what they could regularly be doing: they could improve their math, science, or writing skills.

They could even be learning: Spanish, German, or possibly Chinese.

So obviously, requiring community service would be a huge distraction from the education system.

Some community service may not even be the best for others.

Most would be good, for instance: picking up trash in a parking lot.

However, if one of your students is going to be teaching math or science to another kid as community service, it would be much more effective to be learning from somebody who is in a regular math class, that doesn't have to shorten it's time because of required community service.

However, if community service was not required, then a younger kid could be tutored by one of your students that is in the math class he was before, that has all the required curriculum that the school offered.

However, there is still a way you can have a number of your students participate in community service.

You could offer community service as an optional class, so your school could still partake in community service, without it having to be required.

So for example, instead of a student taking one of the following classes: Spanish, French, German, Latin, Chinese, computers, or gym, they could take an hour out of there day, and choose not to do an optional class, so they could help the community.

This way, you could still have the kids who do community service, without it being forced. As well as people who don't want to participate in community service, who choose to do an optional class instead.

That is how I think community service should be handled at your school.