By Mallory Drover
“The Senior Service Project is a requirement for graduation. Seniors need thirty hours of volunteer work, and not for profit, in the southern peninsula area,” explained Mr. Gutzler, on his second year of coordinating the project.
Each year, senior students at Homer High School are given a list of requirements and forms by adults, and thus begin the first semester of their last year as high school students. The Senior Service Project is one of the requirements among these, and has been a graduation requirement for at “least ten years” according to Mr. Gutzler.
“I’d say the biggest benefit is self knowledge,” Mr. Gutzler continued. “I think students learn a lot about themselves, because I think students, by the time they’re seniors, get pretty good at high school. They have to step outside the four walls of school [for the project].”
The project is also a benefit to the Homer community, and a benefit to exceptional students in ways outside of graduation eligibility. In 2011, the Senior Project provided nearly 3000 hours of service to local non-profit groups. 2010 Graduate Cody Gaines received a $500 scholarship as a result of working with an individual who was blind, and 2011 Graduate Elizabeth Needham earned a $1000 scholarship for her essay describing her volunteer hours at Paul Banks.
“I helped out at the Lutheran church with Vacation Bible School,” senior Casey Parrett informed me. “If you get forced to do a project you really don’t want to do, it would be obviously miserable and you probably couldn’t get very much out of it. But I really enjoyed my senior service project, and I know other people can do projects that they enjoy as well, like going to the pound, etcetera.”
"I really enjoyed my senior service project." -Casey Parrett
Although benefits of the project abound, there are negative opinions of the project as well. When Grace Steiner was asked how she felt about the Senior Service Project, “a hindrance,” was her emphatic response without hesitation.
“The problem is that students do projects that they think are gonna count, and they don’t get them approved ahead of time, and so they don’t get credit for the hours. One student built houses in Mexico, which was a great project, but the whole idea of the senior project is to do it locally.” Mr. Gutzler clarified. “The due date for project approval is November 30th. The deadlines are somewhat flexible, but when we get up to graduation I would just have to tell the principal that the student can’t graduate.”