x2VOL Blog: Tracking Service Hours at your School

Blog post by Michele Pitman, Founder & CEO, intelliVOL

Serving the Uvalde community is an experience that I won’t forget.

As soon as my husband and I heard about the tragedy in Uvalde we were overwhelmed with the need to take action. We immediately knew what to do after seeing a post on social media. We own a food trailer and we follow other highly engaged local food trailers. One of them immediately went to Uvalde for a day and handed out food. We wanted to do the same. We talked to members of our community and within hours, money and donations arrived.

The news is riddled with stories of college applicants bucking the system and working outside of the rules to get into universities of their choice.

College acceptance nowadays takes so many things into consideration when evaluating an applicant. It's more than just about their grades. It's about their extracurricular activities, the sports teams they are on, the clubs they are in, their standardized test scores, and who they are as a person. The stakes are high and students are feeling the pressure.

Community service is an important aspect of National Honor Society membership. In fact, it is part of the NHS motto: “Scholarship, leadership, character, and service.” To honor this motto, many high schools require their NHS members to take part in a certain number of service hours each year.

Service Programs vary in many ways. Many public schools and districts recognize students for their service to the community during graduation. Many private schools require service each semester or each year. Although they vary, there are service program challenges that every school faces at one time or another.

An effective service-learning program can help students learn important Christian values. But service-learning programs often have many aspects to manage, making them challenging to oversee.