<p>IMO, the only way “middle school hours” count is if you continued that activity through high school. For example, I had well over 1,000 hours of community service by the time I graduated high school due to my involvement in a community sports league. I started as a player, began assistant coaching in middle school, coached in high school, and eventually moved up to being president of basketball and a board member for the whole organization. In that case, yes, the middle school EXPERIENCE would be relevant. </p>
<p>Colleges don’t care about hours. They care about the experience. 1,000 hours in various organizations (5 hours here, 10 hours there, etc) wouldn’t amount to much. You have to show their relevance and an area of passion or else you just look like an hour grubber. </p>
<p>And since the vast majority of schools don’t have community service hours listed on transcripts, I highly doubt the colleges care what the number is on there.</p>
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<p>No. You should let your middle schooler be a middle schooler. As long as he gets his required hours, whatever they are, then you shouldn’t be on top of him because colleges don’t care about hours, especially middle school hours.</p>
<p>I think several of us live in the same state/school district. I couldn’t tell anyone WHAT my three kids did for community service in middle school, but whatever it was it counted as enough hours to fulfill the state/district mandated hours required for graduation.</p>
<p>A little something that annoys the bejesus out of me lately is the increase in distance community service projects that sort of turn into vacations. We have participated in a really valuable habitat for humanity-like service organization over the years. Most of the projects are local, and several during the summers were out of state, but within driving distance, requiring large rented vans and a variety of accomodations.</p>
<p>But the ante is continually being upped, so that the last couple of years there have been trips far enough away that travel to the work site requires plane tickets for upwards of 60 people. As we drove past a group of local day workers standing outside a Home Depot on our way to pick up supplies for the work site last summer (and each participant had to pay $600 towards travel, lodging, food, supplies) it occured to more than one of us that the group would be solving many more problems for the community we were there to serve had we each contributed $600 and donated it so the community could have hired workers who NEEDED THE WORK, and who KNOW WHAT THEY ARE DOING… As opposed to hauling a bunch of teenagers hundreds of miles to accomplish … not much.</p>
<p>Eastcoascrazy, I see a business opportunity. I’m creating bumper stickers for your group that read, “Think globally. Jet across the country, and then act locally.”</p>
<p>I’m wondering if this is just our state. What people are describing with middle schoolers racking up hours for carnivals for themselves sounds about right. </p>
<p>My son just went to the “award ceremony” for the people who finished their hours in middle school. He would have gone as a recipient except for the fact that he’s got forms sitting in the backpack totally about 60 hours. So he went to sing in the chorus. But not to worry because he’ll probably get some hours for singing at the ceremony! He says that it looked like almost every 8th grader was there, and the ones who weren’t probably already got their award in 6th or 7th. Given how inflated the numbers are, I’m sure college know what to expect and aren’t comparing our kids with kids in sensible states, but I still wonder if they’d notice if my kid was the only kid in our high school to graduate with only 75 because I told him “don’t bother to turn in the forms”. </p>
<p>They put other things on the high school transcript too. Any foreign language grade taken in middle school is listed with no explanation (e.g. it’s listed as taken in 9th grade) and counts towards the GPA. Any math class Algebra and above is listed, and for some bizarre reason 8th grade English, regular English not just the honors one, is listed. At least that one’s called “8th grade English” so it should be obvious. It drives me crazy and I see no benefit in doing it. It should be obvious from the 9th grade classes what you took in 8th (e.g. if you see French 4 you can assume kid took french before. If you see Precalc you can assume they took Alg. 1, 2 and geometry), why do they need the grades?</p>
<p>I work in a school in a different state than the one I live in, and things don’t work this way there. The only thing on high school transcripts are things that are done in high school.</p>
<p>The only thing that “counts” in middle school is if you take algebra, geometry or begin a foreign language and the only application I have seen that count for is the UCs and there it is just a box to check, they don’t care about the grade. It’s just so they can see you took it as part of the A-G requirement. Nothing else counts from middle school. I do think my son may have mentioned a monetary scholarship he won for college at the end of 8th grade in an attached resume that had other things on it, but I’m not sure if he even did that or not. But nothing from middle school counts, especially community service. And I’m sure that colleges can sniff out from a 100 miles away the standard hours performed to fulfill a school requirement and the activities that were done out of passion and commitment.</p>
<p>Just a FWIW about talking to grandma: my son just finished his senior project for his high school and it involved talking to other people’s grandpas about WWII. My son videotaped the interviews and will be doing a storyboard ( for lack of a better term) and sending the uncut videos to the Library of Congress’s Veterans History Project. </p>
<p>It turned out to be a thought provoking project, and had his own grandfathers been alive, he surely would have interviewed them.</p>
<p>And the Public schools in our county mix community service into the curriculum in middle and high school, so that every kid has community service, but few know what they have done. Yes, it is a joke of a program.</p>
<p>mimk6, I think that’s a much more sensible system.</p>
<p>MD mom, His assignment was more limited, probably because it’s 7th grade, so they didn’t record the interviews or share them beyond the classroom. I still think it’s a fantastic assignment, I just think it’s a little offensive to Grandma that when she takes the time to share her wealth of knowledge with him, he’s the one who gets community service credit! If your son had enjoyed the activity and gone on to complete more such interviews, adding them to the Library of Congress’s collection so that the stories aren’t lost and future scholars can use them? That’s totally community service to me, and a really valuable use of time.</p>
<p>I think maybe your son could record grandma in the future. It is for future scholars and generations. How cool would it be to see grandma talking about her experiences sometime in the future. My son’s was specifically the senior project; his community service was something else.</p>
<p>What I don’t get is how the grandparent history project and assignments like it can be counted as voluntary community service if they’re a class requirement. If my kids counted every time they performed in a concert, ushered a play, did a school service day or worked a class fundraiser as middle schoolers they’d have finished their community service requirements long before they stepped foot in high school and without doing any of what I think of as real community service.</p>
<p>What’s next? Kids finishing their high school community service hours in kindergarten because they gave half the proceeds from their summer lemonade stand to charity?</p>
<p>IMO counting community service hours is as useful as counting the time a student spends with his or her butt parked in the classroom. It’s what they’ve done and learned that’s of value, not simply the time they’ve spent.</p>
<p>I’d love to see him record her story! His grandmother’s story is what I’d consider “quintessentially American”. She was born and raised on a sharecropper’s farm and came North when WW2 opened up opportunities for both women and African Americans. When I think how much the world has changed since she was born!</p>
<p>CuriousJane, you are overthinking this if you think adcoms are really comparing Curiouskid to Curiouskid’s-next-door-neighbor on the basis of middle school service hours. Relax. They see it all. They are going to be making distinctions on far broader and grosser areas than that. They don’t care about the hours. Can I repeat, please? They don’t care about the hours. If you’re going to leverage community service, it’s about what you learned - in general and perhaps about yourself and your interests and how you could serve the college. Please stop worrying about x hours versus x+10% hours.</p>
<p>Sue22, one of my big gripes about community service is that it is so easily manipulated and enhanced. I do know band kids who added up all their public concert hours and added them in. Some hours (as in community non-school bands) do seem as though they would count, but is is open to interpretation.</p>
<p>Google the Veterans History Project and perhaps your son would be able to do something. We all work with the people we know. It would be a great honor to his grandma to complete a project for her and it might tweak another interest.</p>
<p>Just to clear up what may be confusing: in our district, every kid is required to have a certain number of documented community service hours in order to graduate from high school. It is possible to begin accumulating those hours in middle school, (just as it is possible to take high school level math classes in middle school) and most local middle schools arrange for all the community service hours to be completed during the middle school years. </p>
<p>But if you move here in high school, or didn’t attend one of those middle schools that arrange community service projects, you still have to complete and document the community service hours prior to graduation. It really stinks for anyone moving here at the beginning of senior year. </p>
<p>I don’t think those hours “show up” on anything being sent to any colleges. (High school math taken in middle school does show up on the high school transcripts) I don’t recall seeing anything on my kids’ transcripts other than a little box stating that required community service hours had been completed. So nobody sweats about it at all, except the people who move here as seniors.</p>
<p>MD Mom,
I realize it might look like I was criticizing your son’s work with veterans’ oral histories when actually I think it would be a fabulous and very worthwhile senior project. Sorry if I was unclear. My objection was to the 7th grade required grandparent interview being called community service. Not sure how turning in a report on your own grandparent for credit benefits the community at large.</p>
<p>Luckily college admissions officers aren’t brain dead. They know that some kids pad their hours and they value a bunch of unfocussed community service hours about as much as a year of JV soccer or election to secretary of the French club.</p>
<p>Why oh why do schools think it is of benefit to kids to help them pad their hours? It’s a bit like the schools that make every senior on a sport team a co-captain so they can all claim it on their college apps. In the end all it’s going to do is hurt the kids from that school system who really do deserve the position when the AO’s for the region figure out that the school’s fudging.</p>
<p>With any claim of community service I’d ask whether it would pass what my DH calls the purple test. Could you explain it (in this case to an AO) without your face turning purple from embarrassment?</p>
<p>I spent my Saturday afternoon playing a concert for seniors at the retirement home, community service.
I got an A playing an end of term concert for my parents and those of my bandmates, not community service.</p>
<p>I never thought about what other kids did for their community service hours or cared if they got credit for something that wasn’t as “meaningful” as something else.
You get out of it more than what you put into it, but if someone didn’t want to take it seriously, they were just hurting themselves, IMO.
Older Ds 2000 hours, sounds impressive, but she began when she was twelve ( when her sister started, they had raised the minimum age), and it included working all day in the summer. ( it also meant that even during holidays, like Thanksgiving, she would run to the barn to take care of the ponies) it also gave them a strong stomach for dealing with really gross stuff.</p>
<p>Both of the girls schools,required community service hours ( 200, I think), school form just had a place where that was checked off.</p>
<p>haha. this reminds me of my d. After she had the 50 hrs that were required for graduation, she stopped turning in her hours. End of soph year, or maybe some time in jr year, D applie d for NHS. only to find out on the form that they required X hours in X specific time period. She had met that, but by that time had stopped turning in her hours. She didn’t care, but I did! I got her to run around getting validation. Now I feel sheepish about it and should have let the chips fall where they may. but I did think it was wrong to spring that on them.</p>