Tracking Community Service

Diana Holden

Good afternoon,


We are new to Blackbaud Education Management and are looking for the best ways to track community service. I've found a few older threads that mention community service, but was hoping that there were other ideas out there. Our previous SIS had a community service module that allowed entry of hours/location worked and kept a running total. I know we can create a custom field, but that will only capture the hours entered, not the service completed.


Thanks!


Diana

Geoffrey Goodfellow

Hi, Diana.


We created a Community Service "course" that spans the entire acadmic year and then enrolled every student in that course. The teacher who is responsible for tallying service hours was then assigned as the teacher of this new "course". This provides a bulletin board where information can be posted about community service opportunities and forms. The roster also allows her to communicate with parents/teachers, and we added a single 10-point assignment to the gradebook to represent the 10 hours of service each student needs to do for the year. If a student has done 5 hours, then she keys in 5, and it shows that they have 50% of their service done for the year. When they turn in more service hours, then she increases the number. Parents and students can see the number on their progress screen to track their progress. Not a perfect solution, but it works rather well for us.

Diana Holden

Thank you, Geoffrey. I was leaning toward the idea of a class for community service and it is good to know that this option can work.

Lauren Marcus Eisenberg

Following! Our HS students - in a typical year - are required to complete 40 hours per year. We would like a way to track this within BB, but up to now have relied on another vendor's software.

Christine Nichols

We created a custom (publishable) field called Service Hours (Completed / Required) as text input. The person in charge of tracking Community Service hours (hours vary by grade level), updates the field which is visible to parents and students on the contact card. The person can also import the numbers pretty easily. This gives our students and parents what they want to see: hours completed / hours required.