I was wondering if there is a way track service hours which are required for all students. Parents are also required to give time to school...we call them PIP (Parents in Participation) At present we import information as notes...

We track community service through Activities on the students record. You can track by year, dates, and/or activities. They can then be printed on transcripts and report cards.

This spring I imported our community service hours from a Lotus Notes database (it had been in Filemaker before that) I had explored creating a course and class, using attributes or creating actions. The Community Service cooridnator and I decided to use the activities tab as the place to hold the information. Some things to consider: 1. The activities tab will fill up quickly if you also record admission interests, sports activities, clubs, and other tracked events. 2. Tracking information by organization served will require some forethought. (How many hours do we give XYZ in the community?) 3. The hours per week or weeks per year boxes are integer fields so recording 2.5 hours can't be done. Unfortunately my attendance tracker for our CS day reports minutes of service. We round off or up. 4. Unless the community service coordinator cooperates, the activity dropdown can get very lengthy and have multiple duplicate or similar entries. 5. The tab (or the later transcript function) will not total the CS hours. 6. Using the transcript or report card feature will allow you to report CS progress to faculty, advsiers, or parents. This spring we posted an academic summary (a modified transcript) to NetClassroom, so parents were aware of CS progress towards graduation. Over the years I repeatedly asked Blackbaud to create a Community Service tab so we could track it. Most of Blackbaud's education clients have some type of CS requirement for graduation, so it would make sense that they would have a function to help us record this progress. If you remember in version 6 there was an employment tab that could have been modified very easily to accomplish the function.