Helping the Community One Student at a Time Anonymous

What does community service mean to you? Explain how you have benefited your community.

In my school “community service” generally implies hours of monotonous work that is rewarded by service points. However, this year my school has offered a different form of community service, one that would require hours of my time on a daily basis and would remove the coveted senior privilege of early dismissal. The program is entitled Peer Group Connection (PGC), where a selected group of seniors are broken into pairs and assigned to a group of freshmen—in my case sixteen of them—to watch over, befriend, discipline, and formally instruct once a week. Our roles in their lives were to help them grow comfortable and excel in school, but we were encouraged to help them with any outside problems they might encounter. The PGC experience gave me perspective on my life while helping my school’s ninth graders adjust to the intimidating high school environment.

Peer Group Connection allowed me to witness the struggles and hardships that teenagers battle and reminded me of the difficulties that arise when adjusting to a new environment. I unfortunately witnessed the unimaginably difficult problems of many freshmen; whether it was domestic problems or...