All club and organization (CLOG) community service must be pre-approved by College and Career Specialist Alcina Rosas, students cannot receive more than four service hours for each event, and “students cannot purchase items or donate money to be compensated with community service hours,” according to the new “CLOGs Community Service Request” form, which must be filled out before holding an event. The school put a temporary pause on CLOG community service until the form was put out, Rosas said.
Rosas later clarified in a follow-up interview that the four service hour limit only applies to students making or packaging items. However, this change has not yet been updated in the form.
While donating is really helpful, students don’t get to see the direct impact of it, Rosas said.
“Community service is the act of helping your community,” Rosas said. “(By donating), they’re not actually out there serving their community — they’re just dropping something off.”
When students receive community service hours for donating, they are essentially exchanging money for hours, Activities Director Deana Querubin said.
“It’s like buying community service hours,” Querubin said.
Although various donation drives have taken place for a while, there was only an objection to giving out community service hours after the Interact Pasta Drive and the Color Me Curious (CMC) Toy and Art Drive, Interact Fundraising Board Director and CMC liaison Mahika Mahesh said.
“We never had to get any approval of community service (for CLOGs before),” Mahesh said. “I think it should have been specified before that we couldn’t do it … We would have appreciated it if a few more regulations were sent out before.”
There were five locations where students could drop off donations for the Toy and Art Drive, including one in the library. Being so close to a drop-off spot, Rosas saw what students were donating and the hours they were claiming in exchange, she said.
“I think maybe because it was so directly in my line of sight; (previously) I never really realized — it never felt like that many hours,” Rosas said. “I feel like this one definitely — not that the club itself was abusing the system — but I think certain students were claiming more than what they should have.”
Interact’s Pasta Drive was being held at MHS, Piedmont Hills High School, Independence High School, and KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) San Jose Collegiate from Jan. 12 to Jan. 30, with “all proceeds going to Project Hello, which helps support the unhoused community,” according to Interact Area Six’s Instagram.
The issue that came up with Interact’s Pasta Drive was that it wasn’t brought to her attention and administration’s attention, Rosas said.
“It was posted on Instagram, and that’s not an MUSD-approved platform,” Rosas said.
The only requirement for clubs before holding a drive was turning in an event proposal form that would get approved or rejected during ASB’s Executive Cabinet (ECAB) meetings, Mahesh said.
“Drives are considered an event, and they were approved, both Color Me Curious and Interact, all approved at the ECAB meeting,” Mahesh said.
If CLOGs want to host an event, it must go through ECAB for approval, Querubin said.
“The reason is because we just need to make sure that there is no existing facility usage already, and that way, we have a clear understanding as ASB — like, if admin asks me or ASB what this event is, we need to be able to respond,” Querubin said. “So it’s just for us to all know and all be on the same page.”
However, event approval at ECAB is completely different from community service approval, Querubin said.
Prior to implementing the new policies, there was no process for approving CLOG community service, she said.
“Actually, the admin was the one who told us that we should create something because some of the offers (of community service hours without a proper approval process for CLOGs) are a little problematic,” Querubin added.
The proceeds of the CMC x Interact Toy and Art Drive will be donated to the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford, as well as distributed among children in the community who are protected by the McKinney-Vento Act — children who don’t have a stable home, Mahesh said.
The Toy and Art Drive was held last semester, from Nov. 21 to Dec. 19th, Mahesh said. It was brought back again this semester and was supposed to extend from Jan. 28 to Feb. 11, but on Feb. 6, Interact put up a post stating that both the Toy and Art Drive and the Pasta Drive were over.
CMC received a lot of donations and had a lot of success with their Toy and Art drive, though the amount of hours students were able to receive was “a bit excessive in a way,” Rosas said.
“They said small, medium, and large would receive a certain amount of hours per item, but there was really no specification on what was considered small, medium, or large,” Rosas said. “A lot of students would just put large and get a full hour for a notebook or something.”
Once the “CLOGs Community Service Request” form is filled out and turned in, it could take about a week to get processed, Rosas said.
“I review it, and then I give it to one of our admins to review,” Rosas said. “Then, based on our decision, it can be approved or denied.”
The only issue they had with drives was that students could get community service hours for simply purchasing items, Rosas said.
“I want to clarify – doing donation drives is great,” Rosas said. “I think it’s a great way for students to help out in the community.”
Even though students will not be receiving community service hours in exchange for donating to drives in the future, it’s always good to help out the community, Interact co-president Kensie Vongchanh said.
“We’d be really grateful if we still had more donations,” Vongchanh said.
