At Kamehameha Schools, a lot of things rely on community service hours. As a senior, community service looks excellent on your college applications, when applying for scholarships, most of the scholarships require community service and rec letters from these community service leaders.
This presents many issues. One is for those who do community service, but with various organizations. If you volunteer once or twice for different organizations, it is very difficult to establish a bond with any of the leadership. It is also a high possibility that they will not remember you enough to write you a letter. Some students fill their summers or breaks with internships or research programs, which take up a majority of their time. Coupled with school work and hard classes, students have no time or effort to give for additional community service.
Kamehameha Schools has prided itself on being a heavy athletic school. A majority of students play one or more school sports throughout the year and many play club sports year-round as well. As a former athlete, I know how demanding it can be. There are no rest months. You go from school season to club season. For some, they play two sports at once. Practices take up three out of four days not counting games. And last two or three hours after school. After all of that, and balancing school work, there is absolutely no time to do community service.
Senior year is also much too late to be doing community service since scholarships are being turned in. Looking closer into these requirements it could be deduced that these scholarship requirements are unfair towards student-athletes, especially athletes who decided to stop playing their senior year to focus on school.
A suggestion for underclassmen, participate in the same community service when you are a junior. Make sure to bond with the leadership and ask them for a recommendation letter for senior year. Continue to give as much help as you can to this organization. For student-athletes, those few weeks of summer break before pre-season training is a good time to serve.
The Realities of Community Service
January 28, 2024
About the Contributor
Kaʻie Naboa-Cordy, Reporter
Aloha Kākou! My name is Kaʻie Naboa-Cordy I am a senior and this is my first year with Ka Mōʻī. In my spare time, I like to read, write, research, listen to music, and watch TV. I do not plan on pursuing a journalism degree, instead, I plan on going to college to be involved in healthcare and medicine. I do love writing though, especially creative writing, and in the next few years I am trying to fit in the time to learn more about writing so when my career and life settle down, I will be able to be an author on the side. But anyways, this past summer I was able to do a research project based on journalism, and intern with the Hawaii Pacific Health Communications department, which focused mainly on journalism. Through my project and internship, I realized how important journalism is for all careers. Specifically, I witnessed many doctors and nurses write and publish articles about their patients and careers in order to reveal the reality of healthcare and some patients' situations. Through their writing, they were creating transparency about health care and its needs. The simple version of why I want to work in healthcare is to be able to help people in their time of need. And the reality is, sometimes, just fixing their injury or sickness won’t do the job, sometimes like I mentioned above, patients’ voices need to be heard. Journalism is a way for me to achieve this goal. I hope to develop my writing and journalism skills for the future through this class. This year, I aim to advocate for our school, students, staff, and community, and to make sure that their voices are heard and acknowledged.
