Seventy-five clock hours of community service are required for Arkansas' public school students starting with this year's class of ninth graders who will graduate in 2026-2027.
That single Class of '27, an unusually large class of more than 39,000 students statewide, has the potential to generate almost 3 million hours of community work over their four years of ninth through 12th grades. And similar numbers of service hours could be expected from subsequent classes of graduates.
The Arkansas LEARNS Act, or Act 237 of 2023, mandates the documented community service time but leaves it to the local public school districts and open-enrollment charter schools to approve partnering organizations for providing community service opportunities.
The new law phases out by 2025-2026 an earlier law that made 75 hours of community service an elective course for high school course credit.
The community service requirement in the new law is not tied to course credit, nor does it apply to the state's private school students, including those who are using Educational Freedom Accounts. The Educational Freedom Accounts are funded by taxpayers for tuition and other private school and home school costs. The vouchers, worth $6,856 per account this coming year, were also authorized by the LEARNS Act.
The Arkansas Division of Elementary and Secondary Education will take public comments on a draft set of rules for carrying out the community service requirement at 1 p.m. April 19 in the Department of Education auditorium, 4 Capitol Mall in Little Rock.
At that hearing or in written comments submitted by the public through April 24, members of the public can suggest revisions to the four-page set of draft rules to be considered before any final action is taken by the Arkansas Board of Education later this year.
In the meantime, school systems have taken steps to publicize the community service requirement and help students connect to community service opportunities.
The Little Rock School District, for example, has a list of partners for its schools to use, Lequieta Grayson, the district's guidance services coordinator, said.
The Arkansas Food Bank is one of the partners that has service opportunities available for students, Grayson said. Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families has used district students to help with their annual Soup Sunday event. Some of the other organizations on the district's three-page list are the American Red Cross, Arkansas Special Olympics, Arkansas Repertory Theatre, Quapaw Area Council-Boy Scouts, Little Rock Animal Village and Asbury United Methodist Church Food and Diaper Pantry.
"Currently each high school has a site coordinator that is advertising opportunities for students and some teachers have been asked to provide hours within their class," Grayson said in an email response to questions. "Students can still create their own project and get approval. Clubs are also working with students to provide community service learning opportunities."
As for how community organizations, including churches, can sign up for student volunteers, Grayson said the district has a state-approved application that partners fill out. That information is passed along to the district's School Board for approval. The partner organization list is then updated and sent out to schools.
"We want churches to fill out applications so that if their youth are working to impact our community, they can receive credit," she said.
At Sylvan Hills High School in the Pulaski County Special School District, efforts have been made this year to give students in all grades access to community service hours, faculty member Allison Harper said.
"Most students don't know where to start when you tell them 'Hey, you need community service hours,'" Harper said last week. "They don't know what that means. It's a blank look you get from the students."
On days when schools were closed this school year for teacher training, students could use the time to attain six hours of volunteer service, Harper said.
Additionally, two "Bear Service Days" were held in the fall and spring of this school year, enabling some 1,200 students -- those with signed parental permission slips -- to get a jump on their community service hours by working with businesses, churches and City of Sherwood parks and other properties for part of a day. School bus transportation to the sites and lunches were provided to student workers who ultimately returned to campus for afternoons of clean-up and fix-up work there.
On those service days and throughout the school year classes of students have taken turns picking up trash, raking and weeding beds, working in food pantries, helping at elementary schools and local nursing homes, and building wooden bird feeders and yard sets of dominoes.
"It's a lot of work to pick kids for all of these activities, but we feel the benefit to kids has been tremendous," Harper said of the activities, which also require students to reflect on the work they have completed.
She wondered what will be the graduation status for students who earn course credits but fail to get the minimum 75 hours.
"Will we make them repeat their senior year? What does that look like?" she asked.
Payton Zielstra, an 11th grade member of Sylvan Hills' Student Voice leadership group, described his role in the community service initiative: "While everyone else was out in the public doing what they were supposed to do, we provided them with the rakes and tree clippers, whatever they needed," he said. "If they didn't know how to do something, we would help them. Other times we were here at the school cleaning and organizing, and putting up shelves in the shed in the back."
Hope Weaver, an 11th grader, said she has earned about 60 hours this year in part by cutting, assembling and painting wooden bird houses for animal shelters.
The Arkansas LEARNS Act, as well as the draft rules, call for the community service requirement to be made up of three parts for each student: preparation, action and reflection.
The draft rules also call for organizations that offer community service opportunities to certify or verify to the student's school that a student has completed the service. Additionally, the student must submit to their school appropriate documents of their experience.
The partnering organization -- which may or may not be a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization -- must receive local school board approval. School districts themselves are automatically approved as partnering organizations.
The community service can be performed in or outside of Arkansas and before, during or after school hours, according to the draft rules.
The community service programs must explicitly address student safety and privacy issues, "which may include background checks and ethical conduct protocols," the draft rules say.
Karen Walters, superintendent of the 9,600-student Bryant School District, said her School Board approved a community service plan for students last summer.
"We knew this was something we needed to get done quickly because parents would have questions," Walters said last week.
But the district will use the public comment period this month to ask the Arkansas Division of Elementary and Secondary Education to clarify or revise portions of the draft rules that seem to make districts responsible for listing and vetting each potential community service partner, Walters said.
"In our plan, we have stated that it is a parent's choice as far as what they want to determine is community service for their child," she said.
"We have lots of churches in town. We have students who help with youth groups and we have students who go on mission trips in the summer. We just don't have the [district] staff to monitor all of that."
Walters said she doesn't want the district's inability to check out every volunteer partner to stifle student opportunities to get credit for work such as mowing an elderly neighbor's yard or for participating on a church mission trip to a different country.
She said she absolutely wants students to get credit for those efforts. But she also said she is not comfortable with her district producing a list of organizations open to student volunteers. Such a list would wrongly imply to parents that the district had checked out the organizations.
"We can't vet every organization [or individual] that wants volunteers," she said. "I can't put my name on that."
The state law and the draft rules make adjustments for students who move into an Arkansas public high school after the ninth grade or plan to graduate early. Those students must meet a minimum requirement for each year they are in the public school: 15 hours for ninth grade, and 20 hours for each of 10th, 11th and 12th grades.
Additionally, the law and draft rules permit school districts to grant waivers of the community service requirement on a case-by-case basis for situations such as a major illness of the student or a family member, homelessness, or if a student is a major contributor to family income.
The draft rules also permit waivers for medically fragile or disabled students.
A request for a community service waiver must be voted on by the local school board on a case-by-case basis.
The Bryant School District's website page on community service is here: https://www.bryantschools.org/page/csl
The draft rules governing community service and diploma requirements are here: https://dese.ade.arkansas.gov/Files/Community_Service_(Draft)_Legal.pdf