Dunham School
At Dunham, service is a graduation requirement. The school mission is to educate the mind and build a Christ-like heart including giving of self to help others. Students not only take a school community service pledge, but service fulfills college admission prerequisites. To ease student service tracking and data recording and to produce the reports needed for college documentation; Dunham has chosen x2VOL, which is an award winning service tracking and reporting system.
Before x2VOL, community service administrators had difficulty keeping track of student service because students had to fill out all the paperwork by hand. Collecting documentation from each student was more than difficult... [Click the link below to read the full case story]
J Serra High School
Dan Everett, Christian service director at J Serra High School turned to x2VOL a few years ago to manage the school’s service program. The existing program was cumbersome and time-consuming because it was managed with papers and binders. “Before using x2VOL, we required that the students fill out a form, take the form to their service location, get a supervisor to sign off and then return it to school where our administrative process began,” explained Mr. Everett. “Once we got the form, we approved the hours by hand, entered it into a paper log or database and then filed the paper which we kept forever.”
J Serra High School administrators noticed that procrastination decreased and service hours increased when the school migrated to x2VOL. “In an instant, paper was gone, data entry was gone,” says Mr. Everett. The students noticed the difference too. They had a powerful system, accessed via computer or mobile device to simply click and confirm their hours. With recordkeeping and reporting in a digital form students understand, they did a better job keeping track of their work. And as the process eased, total number of hours students gave to local charities increased.
Saint Agnes Academy
In theory, managing St. Agnes’ community service program was simple: students submitted a form at the end of each service activity, the advisor signed off, stored it in a three-ring binder and manually recorded the hours in a log book tracking every student’s efforts. One teacher was assigned to manage each class, either the freshmen, sophomores, juniors or seniors. But as student hours accumulated, so too did the width of the log book and burden each teacher carried. There are over 350 students at St. Agnes. With 100 students per class, one teacher could be monitoring 3,000 hours or more per year.
Sixteen-year veteran teacher, Mary Miller, sums up how x2VOL eliminated the paperwork hassle. “Paper submission and management was a nightmare!” Students had to get a form at school and sometimes they would forget to take it to the charitable organization. That simple misstep meant students couldn’t recall everything they had done and couldn’t adequately write about their efforts. Once the form was submitted (either on time or late), teachers had to approve each form by hand and record it on the log sheet.
