National Honor Society, NHS, is a merit-based honor society that recognizes high school students who demonstrate strong academics, leadership, character, and service to their community or school. The program empowers students with the knowledge and skills to be a transformative leader in the school, and helps build a framework for students to follow. To join NHS, the current requirements are a 3.75 GPA, and members must maintain a 3.75 GPA and complete 35 hours of community service for local non profit organizations each year.

The society provides students with an opportunity to connect with their community around them. With all of the hours from students combined, it is estimated that they saved the community around $210,300 in labor hours alone. Members in NHS completed over 6,200 hours of community service, Sarah Benevides (12), an officer of the society, said, “It pushes people to go outside and meet with the community around them, providing not only a positive impact to the community but with an insight into the community that we’re helping.” NHS helps students build some of the key pillars such as scholarship, service, leadership, and character. It’s not only about just collecting hours, it’s also about having students perform selfless acts that help build moments that can resonate with them and encourage them to continue acts of service to help others.

Despite these benefits, many students believe that the faults in the NHS at Pine Creek make it not worth it to join. Some issues that students brought up were: lack of standards, boring presentations that felt lifeless or made by AI, unneeded attendance, hours being limited, hours not being approved, and not being able to get lunch due to the meetings. Aubrie Buress (12) said,  “Especially with clubs that have hours, it starts to pile up, 35 for NHS, 10 for that, 10 for this, and now it’s 55 hours and possibly more. Not to mention that you can’t even double dip hours for work you did for other clubs.” The society also has a “probation” warning for students at the start of the second semester if they haven’t gotten at least 17 hours of community service. Threatening juniors with removal from the society, and threatening seniors with not being able to get their cord. Multiple students highlighted the fact that this “probation” made them feel nervous and worried more about it because of how competitive it is to get hours.

One of the biggest possible improvements mentioned by students was the possibility of making the accumulation of hours more accessible. With current limitations it leaves many students feeling like they can’t get hours. One requirement is that they can’t get hours from a place that requires them to sign a waiver to volunteer. Although, many students also feel like the app they use, “Helper Helper” could be to blame as sometimes they get the notification for new hour opportunities a week late. Even with all these concerns, NHS continues to be the largest honor society in the school with 240 active members, and with the society growing, improvements are always being made, NHS Advisor, Heather Scott, said, “One of the improvements we are working on is to allow newly inducted members a larger window of time to complete the required community service hours by moving the application and induction process from the fall to the spring. This move allows inducted members to begin their community service over the summer.”