A lack of student accountability in the US Community Engagement program

Examples of community engagement at CGS. Photos courtesy of www.catlin.edu, www.babieswithbooks.org and www.youtheducatingpolice.org.

Nationwide, most private schools are in agreement that community engagement should be a part of the high school experience. A community engagement program can result in many benefits to students, including the following: cultivating compassion, developing a sense of social justice, self-discovery, encouraging civic and social responsibility, and learning about challenges facing local communities such as poverty, hunger, lack of quality education, and homelessness, among others.

Head of the Catlin Gabel School’s (CGS) Upper School (US) Aline Garcia-Rubio confirms the school’s institutional commitment to community engagement.

“We believe that our graduates need to have that experience in the world to be better people and to understand, to learn from, the communities that we are with,” stated Garcia-Rubio. “We believe it is beneficial to personal growth and to understanding oneself.”

However, many parts of the CGS community engagement program need improvement. For starters, it is unclear to both students and faculty how CGS defines the term itself.

“It's hard for us to ask students to do something that we are not defining,” said English teacher Liz Harlan-Ferlo, who is leading the community engagement efforts this year as her “extra duty.” (Each faculty member is responsible for one significant duty beyond teaching in their support of the functioning of the US.)

Redesigned community engagement program eliminates hourly requirement

In 2015, junior class presidents, Connor Ford ‘16 and Isabel Rooper ‘16, redesigned the community engagement program. The proposal, approved by faculty vote and former head of the US Dan Griffith, was implemented in the 2014-2015 academic calendar year.

In a CatlinSpeak article published in September 2014, Ford and Rooper expressed their high aspirations: “We hope this program will help to cultivate a culture on Catlin Gabel’s campus which embodies and encourages service learning.”

Their proposal eliminated the previous 15 hour per year (60 hours over four years) service-hour graduation requirement to “encourage students to pursue their passion and make meaningful change in the form of community service, instead of merely checking off boxes after the completion of an hour of experience.”

“They thought that [eliminating the hourly requirement] would generate more buy-in, student interest, and better experiences,” said US faculty member Dave Whitson who last year volunteered to help provide more structure around community engagement.

Advocates for project-based community engagement argue that logging service hours encourages students to lose sight of the lessons learned. By engaging in a project, students are more likely to identify a cause that they are passionate about and focus on the impact they are making rather than simply tracking the number of hours.

“The philosophy was that we did not want to attach a stick, a punitive element, to not doing community engagement,” said Garcia-Rubio.

Mandating volunteerism

Proponents of an hourly requirement argue that once a student is required to do community engagement, the student might actually enjoy it.

''If it was not mandatory, I never would have looked into doing it,'' said Emily Fried, a senior at Roslyn High School, in the New York Times article “The Logic of Mandatory Volunteerism.” ''But once I started, I liked it. And I have continued doing it because I realize how important it is to help other people. It has been very fulfilling for me.''

Zinda Foster, the US Service Learning Coordinator at Lakeside School in Seattle, concurs.

“I have students who absolutely balked at doing service and at the end admitted that it was another growth opportunity that they wouldn’t have done without pressure,” wrote Foster in an email.

Most Portland area high schools and independent schools nationally have implemented an hourly graduation requirement and track hours using apps such as MobileServe and x2VOL.

For these schools, the policy for incomplete community service is withholding the delinquent seniors diploma for graduation, ensuring that all students take community engagement seriously. By choosing not to track hours, it becomes much more difficult for CGS to make community engagement a graduation requirement.

“[An hourly requirement] is very handy because it's a way to hold people accountable, but what actually happens inside of those hours?” said Harlan-Ferlo. “For some people, that could be really meaningful work. For other people, it could be, ‘I did this because I had to do it...and I hated it.’”

But Yom Fox, the Director of Community and Global Partnerships at The Dalton School in New York City, argues that learning how to give back to the community is a skill.

“For some people it's innate and for others it's not,” said Fox. “And there are lots of requirements that schools have that are just as arbitrary, but important...like the number of periods for physical education. Having the service learning requirements says giving back to the community is what Dalton values.”

The Ford-Rooper community engagement plan outlines new responsibilities

Ford and Rooper had hoped that “this unique, progressive approach that provides students with more freedom and opportunity to complete service work will revive the importance of service in our community.”

While their intentions were admirable, their vision has not become a reality.

“The current community engagement policy is so mushy that there is basically zero accountability,” said Whitson.

In addition to eliminating the community service hourly requirement, new responsibilities were placed on the students, C&C advisors, ninth grade English faculty, and the CGSA under the Ford-Rooper proposal.

Responsibilities under the redesigned Community Service program (per the “Community Service” proposal submitted by Connor Ford ‘16 and Isabel Rooper ‘16)

However, there are many parts of the Ford-Rooper proposal that were never implemented or have not been maintained in the five years since the proposal was approved.

For example, a community service committee was supposed to help C&C advisors with enforcement, guidance or any problems that arose.

If a student’s project goals had not been met by the mid-April deadline, the student was supposed to be punished by missing Takeaway Day and instead working with the Catlin Gabel grounds crew.

Ninth grade English faculty were supposed to be responsible for organizing service days for the class and integrating service learning into the English curriculum. At the time that the proposal was written in 2014, the ninth grade English teachers were already working closely with p.ear, a non-profit supporting homeless youth. The rationale was that ninth graders not only needed more guidance, but that integrating community engagement would also support the teaching of agape, selfless love, in the Corinthians School Chapter part of the English 9 curriculum.

“I started working here in 2016 and no mention of [the ninth grade English teacher community engagement program expectations] was made,” said Harlan-Ferlo.

The CGS US Community Engagement webpage states that “students develop a personal plan for community engagement at the beginning of each school year based on guidelines established by the Catlin Gabel Student Association (CGSA).”

However, the CGSA does not have any established guidelines and is unaware of its responsibility for any part of the community engagement program.

“There was no pass-down from the previous CGSA or our faculty advisors. I had no idea that community engagement guidelines were one of our responsibilities,” said CGSA President and senior Arjun Jain.

Whitson also questions whether a system that relies on C&C advisors is effective. Advisors who are trying to develop a trusting relationship with their advisees do not want to criticize community engagement proposals or call out a lack of commitment.

“Nobody wants to call out that the emperor has no clothes,” said Whitson. “For the advisors, if you challenge your advisees, then you're creating a source of tension and there's not a lot of benefit there.”

It appears that almost everyone agrees that there are challenges with the design and implementation of the community engagement program.

“The execution of the community engagement plan has been flawed,” admitted Garcia-Rubio. “I think it has worked well for students who have enough genuine interest...I think it doesn't work well for the younger students who have a hard time identifying what they might do or have not had that exposure.”

In January 2019, Whitson sent out a survey to all C&C advisors to get a sense of the effectiveness of the community engagement program after the first semester. The survey recorded 285 responses.

“This was a quick interpretation by advisers of advisee self-reported experiences. It’s impressionistic, not definitive,” noted Whitson.

2019 survey data reveals frequency and location of community engagement work

Nevertheless, the survey results reveal areas for improvement. For the question about the frequency of community engagement work, advisors reported that 40% of students were doing “nothing so far” or only had “an isolated experience or two.” Although 12% of students had made community engagement a “constant/central aspect of their life” and the majority of students reported engaging in community engagement weekly or monthly, a high percentage of students were falling through the cracks.

The reality is that there are few consequences for students who choose not to actively embrace or participate in community engagement.

The survey question about the location of community engagement work is also revealing. According to advisors, 50% of their advisees had “not completed any community engagement” or their experiences were “entirely based at CGS” or “primarily based at CGS.” If the intent of the program is to get students out of the so-called “Catlin bubble” and to experience real interactions with people from different walks of life, then this high statistic is evidence that the community engagement program has failed.

“It's not simply about volunteering at a nonprofit,” said Whitson. “It's about students at CGS not being isolated in this bubble, but instead contributing to Portland and being involved in Portland in lots of different ways.”

Understanding the value of US community engagement days

Analyzing the US community engagement program also brings up the question of the value of community service days or half-days where all US students participate in one activity together.

“I don't think [service learning days] are sustainable,” said Fox. “It's not necessarily driven by students' motivation. You want to build practices that foster and engender lifelong civic participation.”

Garcia-Rubio, who is organizing the US community service morning on March 5 as part of the Diversity Summit, has experienced first-hand how difficult it is to find meaningful community engagement activities for 320 students. Many non-profit organizations, such as The Oregon Food Bank, only allow smaller groups of students and many organizations have raised the minimum age limit to 16, which precludes ninth graders.

“You may end up with students doing things that they don't believe in or they don't care about or they're really sort of pushing against,” admitted Garcia-Rubio.

Integrating community engagement into the classroom experience

The gold standard appears to be finding a way to integrate community engagement into the classroom experience. There appears to be a nationwide shift from community service to embracing service learning.

“Service learning goes beyond the concept of ‘helping out’ or ‘volunteering,’” stated Tara Barton in “Service Learning vs Community Service: Why All Schools Need A Service Learning Program Now!” Service learning “combines specific learning goals and outcomes into the community-based activity based on their verified needs, not what we ‘think’ they need.”

CGS favors the term, “community engagement.”

“I think a lot of people look at the shift from community service to community engagement as empty semantics. I do think it's meaningful because what we're trying to say is that we want students engaged with the greater Portland community,” said Whitson.

The US has tried to incorporate community engagement into Winterim and ninth and tenth grade social studies in the past. The global trip to Haiti, which was canceled due to political unrest in the country, had scheduled service learning activities into the trip itinerary. Other global trips incorporate similar service learning opportunities.

“Sometimes embedding community engagement has been effective, and sometimes it feels like a forced, artificial situation,” said Garcia-Rubio.

Before CGS Spanish teacher Roberto Villa retired, advanced Spanish speakers regularly tutored Hispanic children at a homework club in Hillsboro. But examples of integrating community engagement into classes at CGS are sparse. One of the reasons may be that taking a class of students off-campus regularly is logistically challenging, particularly with the CGS rotating block schedule.

“Community engagement should be more interwoven into the curriculum. I think that would actually make it more meaningful,” said Harlan-Ferlo.

Many independent schools are struggling with solutions to these same challenges. The Service Learning Coordinators in the greater Seattle area, including Lakeside, The Overlake School, University Prep and Seattle Academy, have formed a “Service and the Community of Practice” consortium to share ideas and best practices on how to integrate meaningful service learning into the curriculum.

The Dalton School, an independent K-12 school in New York City, is piloting a service learning track for students. Similar to the Honors designation on the CGS transcript, the service learning courses are demarcated on the transcript. Achieving the service learning designation can require up to 80 hours of additional community service. Students who choose not to pursue the service learning component receive the course credit without the distinction.

Lakeside School in Seattle records the service hours on a student’s grades, comments and transcript on a quarterly basis. Their service learning course credits range from global service learning trips to an advanced physics class where students make skateboards for Skate Like a Girl, a non-profit organization providing board sports equipment to low-income girls. The number of service hours a student completes is also noted on the student’s grades, narrative reports and transcript.

A key part of service learning is that it ideally involves self-assessment and reflection before, during and after the activity. Most schools are requiring journal entries as part of the x2VOL or MobileServe tracking app or a summary reflection incorporated into credit for a capstone project.

“With journaling, I provide feedback with every single submission,” said Foster. “We are an institution and in teaching, you have to give feedback.”

Evaluating student motivations

Some teachers expressed concern that the pressure students feel around the college application process can encourage perverse incentives around community engagement.

“There is great incentive to students to offer a really puffed up, impressive sounding experience to launch a nonprofit that never does anything, to design something that ultimately is never used by anybody, to win a grant, to do a lot of things that sound really impressive on paper,” said Whitson. “The entire system is set up right now towards a kind of self aggrandizing form of service, that is more superficial, but that that reads well on college applications.”

To counteract this concern, Harvard-Westlake in Los Angeles requires that service learning hours can only be logged if the service is “hands-on,” defined as face-to-face interaction between the students and the recipient of the service.

At CGS, defining the purpose of community engagement and providing guidance on the types of projects and organizations that qualify as service learning would go a long way toward clarifying what the school wants students to get out of the program.

Is it important that the service takes place off-campus? Does there need to be any one-on-one interaction with the recipient of the service? Can the service take place on a global trip? Does working with the CGS grounds crew or cleaning up the robotics lab or working alone on an app in the library or serving soup to the homeless all count equally as community engagement?

“Who is to say that [working in a soup kitchen] is any less fulfilling or more meaningful than the creation of an app?” said Fox. “I would strongly push back on the idea that there's like a sort of one size fit all. If I don't feel fulfilled by that type of endeavor, it's pointless for me to do.”

Creating a Community Engagement Coordinator position

The CGS mission statement states that “Catlin Gabel supports inspired learning leading to responsible action through dedicated teaching, caring relationships, a challenging curriculum, and community service….” [emphasis added]

There are currently two committees, the CGS Mission Advisory Group and the Advancement & Enrollment Committee evaluating the school’s mission statement and considering revisions based on the school’s values and vision statement.

If CGS determines that community engagement is a fundamental value in educating “bold learners who become insightful questioners, responsible thinkers, and inspired action-takers for life,” then it needs to provide the necessary resources for the program to have an impact on all students.

A faculty or staff position should be dedicated to organizing and providing guidance on community engagement opportunities, similar to Global Trips or Senior Projects or Diversity and Inclusion efforts. One person should be responsible for owning the program.

“We do not have an adult in a position to coordinate this, and that makes it harder,” said Garcia-Rubio.

Fox sees her role as coordinator as instrumental to a successful program at The Dalton School. She provides guidance around different local organizations who accept volunteers under 18, matches volunteer opportunities to student interests, and verifies hours to meet the school’s graduation requirements.

“Building out a program that has support is really important,” stated Fox. “Giving kids a place to go to when they're like, ‘I have this idea. Do you think this could be a service project? or ‘I have this idea, but I just don't know that an organization exists that does this work.’”

Fox also believes that the coordinator is important in evaluating individual student circumstances. Students have so many other commitments, such as athletics, club activities, jobs, Drivers Ed, tutoring, homework, and hanging out with friends, vying for their time. Other students have long commute times to school or care for younger siblings or an ill parent.

“What type of service makes sense for that student?” asked Fox. “We are flexible in what counts as service because people have different stories and needs. So from an equity standpoint, we do the very best we can to work with students wherever they are.”

Harlan-Ferlo sees her students excited about connecting their lives to meaning and purpose and believes that they would welcome an authentic community engagement program.

“If we as a school value community engagement, then we need to create structures that support students doing it,” said Harlan-Ferlo. “I think we really have an opportunity to create a program that creates space for teaching students how to have meaningful encounters.”

And Fox reminds students and faculty to keep in mind the intent behind service learning.

“Whatever the service is, the hope is it elicits a response that stays with the students for a very long time,” said Fox. “The ultimate goal is to create a better world by creating more participatory citizens.”