Parent Volunteer Hours

Joy Campbell
Joy Campbell
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in Blackbaud K–12 Education Solutions™ General Discussions

This may have been answered before - but I did a quick search and couldn't find anything. We require our parents to serve a certain number of hours each school year. I'm amazed that with a robust program like BB, there's no way for parents to input those hours, or for us to track those, other than a google sheet or something of that sort, which would then need to be put in manually. I'm hoping I'm wrong, and that I just haven't discovered it yet. Could someone tell me what you do at your school to track hours?

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  • Lauren Henderson
    Lauren Henderson Community All-Star
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    Answer ✓

    Hi Joy, I've looked at this from the student volunteer (service) hours angle (and I know there is a pretty robust field of ideas in the Idea Bank pertaining to this) but I haven't worked at a school that required, or formally tracked, parent volunteerism.

    I would recommend a Community Group to be able to organize your parents, especially if there are those who spearhead the volunteerism. There is a Bulletin Board, where you could put a link to a google sheet tracking document if you want people to self-report, and maybe provide some soft peer pressure/encouragement!

Answers

  • Crystal Bruce
    Crystal Bruce admin
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    Hi @Joy Campbell - I am tagging in a few All-Stars who might be able to assist. @Lauren Henderson and @Brian Gray to see if they can offer any insight into this if they or someone in their organization tracks parent hours.

  • Brian Gray
    Brian Gray Community All-Star
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    I've thought about this question, but I don't have any ideas for using anything that native to the LMS for tracking hours for parents. I agree that a Community Group is a good option for posting parent opportunities. Another option for that is a tile on the parents' resource board.

    We track student hours using MobileServe, but I don't know if that would work for parents.

    If I were the person who had to make it work, I would probably use a Google form, and throw some magic formulas at the Responses spreadsheet. (I would make the parent's email address a required field so that I had something easy to use to match multiple entries from the same person.)

  • Brian Hoyt
    Brian Hoyt
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    This is a challenge at my school as well. We have (not enforced) language in our contracts / handbooks about volunteering vs money contribution. Since no one is enforcing it, no one wants to put in effort to track it either. The ideal platform would send monthly family reminder emails of incomplete service.

  • Geoffrey Goodfellow
    Geoffrey Goodfellow
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 Name Dropper Participant

    We track service hours by student and not by parent, so my situation is slightly different than your use case scenario, but you might find it helpful. We create a 'class' called service hours and register all of the students in that class. The secretary who is responsible for tracking student service hours is made the teacher for the class. We create a gradebook column of '10 points' that represents the ten service hours each student needs to complete. The teacher then keys in the number of service hours in this column as they are received. For example, a student with a 5/10 in the column shows that they have completed 50% of the service hours for the year. The service hours are visible by the student and parent in the gradebook and student progress screen just like they would view any other class gradebook. We can also use the bulletin board and topics areas of the class to post service hours opportunities and links to other relevant materials and forms. Although we don't use it, you could also probably setup some online assignments for students to upload the proof of their service hours as a PDF.

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