In spite of scheduling difficulties and a lack of resources, the Community Service Office is in the midst of changes intended to make service a more serious and thoughtful commitment for all participants.
The Office has cut down on the number of volunteers in four service programs and is now mandating an orientation session at the beginning of the term. Structurally, the Office has also established what it considers a more equitable first-come-first-serve sign up policy for all programs.
Shortage of Resources
Perhaps the greatest constraint the Community Service Office faces is a lack of time, funding and supervision for service programs.
“There are factors that do prevent us from letting 1,200 kids participate in community service… It’s great that kids want to be involved, and hopefully, in the next couple of years, we can think about expanding our program in a safe and effective way,” said Cueto-Potts.
Cueto-Potts said that finding non-conflicting times for new community service programs is the greatest barrier in expanding offerings. Most students at Andover only have Wednesday afternoons free from classes, but these are often filled with athletic games and commitments. In reality, only students who are sliding or taking morning basics have free afternoons for community service.
Resolving previous safety concerns, this is the first year that all community service programs will have adult supervision, in large part due to the creation of a work-release program for faculty and staff who volunteer. The work-release pilot program, suggested by Head of School John Palfrey and coordinated by Cueto-Potts and the Office of the Dean of Faculty, gives interested staff and administrators time off to supervise community service programs each term.
Lack of Depth
Every community service program conducted a mandatory orientation session at the beginning of the term to educate the programs’ participants and establish a sense of responsibility, according to Sarah Coghlan, Assistant Director of Community Service.
“What we’ve been doing up until now was plopping students into organizations and communities that they may or may not be familiar with, and that’s really irresponsible. We’ve been doing a lot of service, but not much explicit learning,” said Monique Cueto-Potts, Director of Community Service.
“[At orientation,] we worked more with the students to contextualize what they were doing, why it’s important, [and] why it’s a good thing to do,” said Coghlan.
In preparation for these orientation sessions, coordinators were asked to delve into their programs’ social areas. For example, ARC, one of Andover’s largest community service groups, educated its volunteers on the prevalence of disability rights and ableism within the state and country, according to Cueto-Potts.
“You don’t want to send someone into something without having them know what it entails. Also, there’s vital information in addition to contextualizing the importance of the issue the people are working with that needs to be communicated,” said Coghlan.
Overcrowding
In addition to mandating orientation sessions, the Community Service Office also decided to reduce the number of volunteers in four service programs where volunteers had previously far outnumbered participants. The four programs are Andover Chinese Cultural Outreach (ACCO), ARC, YDO Destination Imagination and YDO Science.
ARC saw the most drastic cuts of the four, with 60 less volunteers enrolled for this Fall Term compared to last Spring Term. Each Andover student volunteering in ARC is paired with a mentally or physically disabled ‘buddy’ and they spend Tuesday nights in various bonding activities.
“Because there were only 30 to 40 people with disabilities, it didn’t make any sense to have three to four people working with each of them. It kind of defeats the whole purpose of the program, with them not forming actual connections,” said said Nya Hughes ’15, one of the ARC Program coordinators.
“People would be talking about their boyfriends around their buddies, completely ignoring their buddies, hanging out with their friends… We had to cut it to a number where it was safe and where we could watch the buddies and the PA volunteers,” Hughes continued.
During the ARC orientation specifically, returning volunteers were partnered with their buddies from the previous year and were given the new guidelines and expectations for the program, said Hughes. It was announced that ARC will no longer be a term-contained service program, but will require that all volunteers commit for the entire year in order to form more meaningful relationships.
Favoritism
This fall, the Department implemented an online first-come-first-serve sign-up system. In previous years, sign-up numbers were compiled on the last day of sign-ups, which sometimes resulted in long waitlists for certain programs and a bias within the placement system.
“Up until last winter, the office would collect signups, send them to the student coordinators and the student coordinators would sort of hand pick who they wanted in their programs,” said Cueto-Potts.
The new system allowed the department to keep a daily record of the number of volunteers enrolled in each program. Waitlists are now shorter than ever, since students are able to see immediately which programs are full and sign up for another, said Cueto-Potts, In addition, the community service coordinators no longer had influence on the volunteer-picking process.
Some students with sixth lunch were unable to sign up for programs of their choice because the sign up booths closed before sixth period started on Tuesday and some programs, such as Science Club for Girls, were full by Wednesday, said Claire Carroll ’14, Science Club for Girls coordinator.
