High Schools Track Service Hours

Piedmont High School (PHS) in California, like many other high schools, has an Honor Society to recognize students that have kept not only their grades above a certain GPA but have also contributed a certain number of service hours to their community.  Before Track it Forward, students carried around a blue form that they had to complete as they fulfilled their hours at different nonprofit organizations and then turned the paperwork into the College and Career Center at the school. This gave students the opportunity to be responsible for their hours, but unfortunately ”the manual system was time consuming, left some room for error, and didn't allow a way for students to view their community service hours online.” says Shirley, parent volunteer for Piedmont High School. There was a revolving door of parent volunteers that could accidentally make errors in tabulating all the student's total hours into a spreadsheet.  Shirley is a parent volunteer with Piedmont High School and was recruited by the new College and Career Center director to help transition away from the 20 plus year old paper system into a new, more streamlined online system for tracking and reporting volunteer hours.

A few of the other options were either too big and pricey while others only had a few features and weren’t going to be the best fit. Shirley found Track it Forward was the most user friendly and fit the size and needs of the high school. The school agreed to try it out. Shirley loaded over 800 students into the system by using their school assigned email address as the login and their student ID as their initial password. She then insures only the students she enrolled are in the system with Track it Forward’s approval features. She was surprised by the amount of support and accessibility to the founder, and is able to note where Track it Forward has improved and works even better than when she went live with the system for Piedmont High School students almost a year ago.

Shirley is excited to move forward with students being able to enter their own community service hours and being able to run reports on those hours at any time with Track it Forward to insure accuracy. Being able to enter hours from the mobile app is very convenient and seniors can use screen captures of charts or run reports of their logged hours to submit as part of their college application. Everything is automated and with her background in computer science, it was even easier for her to figure out how to customize Track It Forward for Piedmont High. Especially valuable for her is the ability to export all the Track It Forward data into an Excel spreadsheet and through pivot tables, create the reports the principal needs to determine which students will be recognized as being part of the PHS Honor Society.  

As for Shirley’s experience with Track It Forward, “It really fits our needs. It’s a great value. The students are enjoying the autonomy. I can’t say more wonderful things about Track it Forward.”  The stress and errors with the manual system are gone and no one has to spend countless hours tabulating community service hours written on countless pieces of paper anymore. 

Using this system “made us look like super stars” -Shirley