Ah, sweet graduation. Picture this: Walking across the stage in a black and white clad graduation cap and gown. There’s cheering from the crowd as Mr. Douglass calls your name out to walk, with your smiling face plastered on the big screen. Suddenly though, the daydream is over as you’re sitting in the counselor’s office discussing your service hour requirements- or lack thereof.

Graduation is a sweet dream, right? All it takes is passing a few classes, paying a few dues, and baddabing-baddaboom you’re walking across the big stage. Wrong. Those pesky community service hours never fail to sneak up on a select group of the procrastinating school population. As far as catching up with the rest of the community do-gooders? A few of North Atlanta’s soon-to-be graduates weigh in.

For many, the burden of community service is too tedious a process to begin. Senior Kaheya Nash has all of her community service hours, but found a flaw in the system. “It’s not like I have zero community service hours,” she said. “I just find it incredibly difficult to log all of my hours. It’s like an hour long process just to write down and verify my hours.”

As far as her plan to catch up? Nash finds them unnecessary. “I don’t think community service should be a requirement to graduate,” she said. “It’s a tedious process that takes away from every other process we have to put up with to graduate.”    

Senior Khadijah Jones not only finds community service hours unnecessary, but hard to keep up with. “Nobody does community service hours,” she said. “I’ve been avoiding them since ninth grade, almost my entire high school career. They’re hard to be motivated to do.”

No need to worry though; Jones found no problem with turning her hours in on time. “I turned mine on time but it took forever for me to do,” she said. “I spent the entire summer catching up on my hours.”

As graduation draws closer and the stress grows higher, the community service pressure is on for students who still haven’t found the time to do them. For students with little community drive and even less time, the finish line is just around the corner. It takes a village to log these senior’s community service hours, and these seniors need all the help they can get.