Finding time to volunteer while being involved in activities, sports, and trying to maintain a social life as a student is extremely difficult. Our hours of volunteering meet the requirements to become a member of the National Honors Society or even to receive a cord at graduation. However, many of these hours are taken away from students due to the timeline under which hours must be turned in for them to count toward these honors.
Students are only granted two weeks after the volunteering event to turn in their hours to count towards their total hour requirement. For the volunteer hours to count, an adult supervisor must sign the “Pay It Forward” forms that are turned in to track volunteer hours. Often students do not have the forms with them when they are doing their volunteer activities so they must attempt to find a time to gain the signature of the adult present, which often takes more than two weeks to accomplish.
This lack of turnover time greatly decreases many students’ number of hours, they cannot obtain everything needed for the forms within the time frame, so they are forced to forfeit many of the hours they have gained. Students are busy, they have school, activities and friendships that take up lots of time and effort in their lives. Busy days in and out of school don’t give students much time to turn completed hours in right away. The deadline being so narrow for the turning in of hours gives students more things to worry about, which we do not need.
During high school, many students aspire to be a part of the National Honors Society, a requirement for admittance is to have at least a 3.5 GPA and a minimum of 35 volunteer hours. Many students are unable to meet this requirement because they were not able to turn in their hours, due to busy schedules, before the two-week period ended. This has resulted in my not being able to apply to be a part of the National Honors Society.
Another aspiration of many students is to receive a cord for reaching 160 volunteer hours at graduation. While many achieve this, many still need to due to the turning-in process of two weeks currently in place. The current time frame policy wrecks the opportunity for many students to become a part of NHS and obtain a cord at graduation. Students should be granted the entire semester to turn in their volunteer hours. Having more time to turn in hours will result in students obtaining more hours. Students also will be able to more easily reach the requirements for the National Honors Society, helping them with applications. Also, the increase in students in the NHS makes our school look better as a whole.
The two-week turn-in policy for volunteer hours does not take into account how busy students are in their daily lives, and it greatly affects their ability to take part in different honors that they want to achieve. Changing this policy to require hours to be turned in by the end of the semester will be more attainable for students and will allow them to get full credit for all of the volunteering they participate in.
