By Catherine Jou ’15

In MCPS, students are required to fulfill at least 75 hours of volunteer work commonly known as SSL hours before they graduate. Many students go beyond and get upward to 260 hours—the number of hours needed to get an additional cord at graduation. Students can get hours in a number of ways: tutoring, volunteering for school clean-ups and other traditional methods. However, some students find unique charitable ways to get SSL hours.

Senior William Santos has been actively volunteering since middle school. He is a member of the Boy Scouts of America and the Civil Air Patrol (CAP). Along with helping out at food banks and nursing homes, Santos also gets his SSL hours by going on Search and Rescue (SAR) missions.

“One of the things I do is called Ground Team, which is land search and rescue. We work with various organizations from the local or federal level to do anything from searching for missing persons to missing planes,” said Santos.

Through CAP, Santos has participated in two SAR missions for missing aircraft. The searches usually lasted about a day to a day and a half. Although the missions take a long time, he considers it to be more rewarding since it is volunteer work. Santos credits his older brother and sister for exposing him to the program.

He has also been able to learn how to fly a plane with an instructor pilot and is trying to get a private pilot license soon. Santos believes that his involvement with Boy Scouts has led him to want to serve his community, and CAP was a venue that allowed him to combine his interests.

“Growing up I wanted to find ways to help people, and through these organizations there’s a lot of things that I’ve been able to do like help out my community and just people in general,” said Santos.

Because of his experience volunteering, Santos wants to expand into other emergency services like fire and rescue. “In the future I want to go into Air Force ROTC while in college and eventually become a pilot in the Air Force” said Santos.