Dear Principal,

Community service. It sounds really nice to do, right? Wrong! I have done community service before and it is torture. If you do one act of kindness then you will find yourself doing 70 acts of kindness in six seconds. I am talking from experience. There are a billion reasons I could give you why community service is a bad idea, but I'll stick with just one.

First, it takes away from your own activities. After school I go to hockey practice. Three years ago when I had community service, I couldn't do that. Community service started out as a five minute thing about once a day. After a few months I was up to my head and then some with community service. I helped my community for seven hours every single day! School is six hours. I did community service more than I went to school. I barely had time to eat. Or breath! I cleaned up so many beaches that I thought that I had solved the world's pollution problem! Helping your community is great. But it gets out of control. So Principal, don't force us to do community service and make us lose our lives. Let us just do little things and all pitch in every now and then. I have learned that you try harder at things when you do it as your choice, rather than being forced to do it.