Along with the additional entrance tests for Choate applicants, starting this fall, students matriculating at Choate will experience new diploma requirements. The requirements will ask students to complete ten hours of community service each year, not, as it is now, a total of thirty hours throughout their career.
Director of Community Service Ms. Melissa Koomson created the new system along with student, faculty, and administrative input. Ms. Koomson said of the new system, which was approved by three quarters of the faculty, “We are really trying to emphasize that it is community service, and it should be very much engagement-based interaction with people. It is not volunteering to complete hours, or just doing task oriented things like sweeping, raking, or doing things on an assembly line. Students are really evaluating their place in society.”
Students can complete the new requirement of ten hours per year either during the academic year or over the summer. “This requirement change is not for any current students. It is only for new students that matriculate next year,” added Ms. Koomson. “The summer before a third former arrives, they can do their ten hours and then focus on schoolwork during the academic year. Students could definitely do all of their hours in each incremental summer, but we are asking for the reflection to be written within a month of the community service.”
The change in community service requirements originates from a program analysis last year that proposed recommendations that service become a more significant part of a student’s experience. Ms. Koomson said, “There were recommendations in the review that community service become a more integral part of the Choate education.” Ms. Koomson wanted to make sure that the requirement wasn’t just something that students could coast through to get done; she wanted to make it a real experience.
As the community service requirements were reconsidered, various Choate groups contributed to the formation of the proposal. “I shared the proposal with the deans before it went to senior officers,” said Ms. Koomson. “Senior officers had to sign off on it, and then all of the faculty had to vote on it. Before that, I had shared the proposal with some students such as members of the student council to get their input. Overall, people have been really supportive of it and have felt like this is not a huge change.”
The mission statement of Choate’s community service states that the requirement is meant to “inspire and empower Choate students to positively impact local and global communities of service.” It continues, “We encourage students to develop a deeper understanding of their own identity and privileges.”
The statement goes on to stress the importance of “promoting sympathetic engagement and collaboration between individuals both within and beyond Choate’s diverse community, teaching awareness of social justice and the responsibility of environmental stewardship, and facilitating participation and the solution to real world problems and fosters a lifelong commitment to thoughtful and responsible action.” Ms. Koomson said, “We wanted to get this language in the forefront of people’s minds to think about what community service means.”
The change to community service expectations is expected to bring a deeper understanding of service to the Choate community. “It is really great to see the students’ excitement about something come to fruition for a student: to hear them say, ‘I went into this thinking that I would just check off some hours, but this person that I interacted with in my project really made an impact on me and we really connected,’” explained Ms. Koomson. “I am also very excited for students to learn the difference between reporting and reflecting. A lot of times I will get a step-by-step report by the student, whereas we want the reflection piece, which is more of explaining why a given organization needs to be in place.”
The written reflection component of the community service requirement will remain the same in format, but the School hopes that the shift in how hours are earned will inspire a deeper understanding of the work students are doing. “Reflections get at understanding the crux of whatever the issues may be and why such an organization is needed. They also reflect on the impact that you as a server have had on a community, as well as the impact that the community has had on you,” Ms. Koomson added.
“I get really excited to see what students do and where they do it, whether that be here in Wallingford or across the globe,” concluded Ms. Koomson. “We want students to see the bigger picture and how they can change the world.”
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