One of my users wants to keep track of Cummunity Service House for students in EE. They want to break it out with the Date of the activity, the type of activity (Charity Event, Fundraiser, Working with Seniors, etc.) and how many hours the student spent working on these various assignments. Any ideas/suggestions on how to implement this?

Greetings, We use the Activities Tab in Student Records. You can set up the category such as Service or whatever and further refine into specific activities (easiest was to create is using the "F7" key with that field open). We also report out the hours on our report cards and transcripts. Hope this helps! -Steve Cheers, Stephen Stewart Assistant Principal De La Salle Collegiate High School [Email Removed] 586-778-2207

Steve, I looked at using the activities tab this way also. I couldn't find a way to total up the hours. How did you total up the hours of community service? Are you using one of the canned report cards or do you have a crystal report for a report card? thanks, Sharon

Howdy, We do the running total manually via an excel sheet and then have the counseling office update the records. Unfortunate, but a work-around. I suppose you could create a new entry for each of the service hours, but that may become too burdensome for the reports. As report card, we used the boiler plate one within the program and customized it a bit using the various tabs and categories. If you want I can email you a sample if you like. Good luck. Cheers, Stephen Stewart Assistant Principal De La Salle Collegiate High School [Email Removed] 586-778-2207

Thanks - That makes sense then. We keep an entry for each type of community service they do. We have it in an access database and it lists where they did the service, the date, and the hours. Then we print that 2x a year for the students. Not sure why, probably one of those "it's always been done that way", type things. It would be nice to just list total hours as you do. We also use the "Canned" report card. I hope that they one day put in something that makes sense for Community service instead of us trying to get the data in where it doesn't really fit. We don't need the Comm Service hours on the report card but we need to be able to see quickly the total hours a student has earned, as parking spaces are not given to those who have not met the minimum requirements. (neither is a diploma for that matter!) Thanks! Sharon

We use the conduct tab. We don't keep track of conduct in EE due to concerns of privacy in our Dean's office. We use the infraction area for the type of service that they do, and then use units for the number of hours volunteered. We need to put the hours on report cards (custom) and transcripts (also custom) so the information needs to be available in EE. So far it seems to be working for us. There are some issues but the fact that we can keep the info in EE outweighs the difficulties - obviously you can't do this if you keep track of conduct - I think that BB needs to address this need. - Gail

Pardon the cross posting, but I placed the following under the Registrar subject and the Service Hours topic: 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.

A request has been filed under solution BB38427. Therefore if anyone interested adds themselves to the list it will help for Blackbaud to create tab for tracking community hours.

We track community service under activities also. I then include them in report cards under Summary/Notes, preview the report cards, then export them to Crystal Reports, there I can add a formula to total the service hours and print what type of service and cumulative number of hours. Note: I print report cards by grade, so this has to be done for each grade level before I print. J. Widmaier Notre Dame Preparatory [Email Removed]

This thread is two years old, but as far as I can tell, the same problem persists- we need an automated way to track, total, and report (via NetClassroom) on running total of community service hours. We currently use the activities tab, but that only shows up on report cards. My latest suggestion is to create a course record for community service, but our CS coordinator will still have to maintain running totals in Excel and manually update the students' "grades" in the course as the total of their CS hours to date (for students and parents to be able to see running totals.) Why isn't there a module for this yet.... two years later? Come on BB!

I would have to agree there is no good option until BB builds a service table in the DB.

 We use Actions to track service hours, and then export to excel, total, and merge into word, then copy and past each merged student info into a notetype, so we can have service site, hours, total hours, etc...

 Its kinda a pain, but works well, and the format looks great on transcripts...(because of the note...)

Bump! Vote for Service hours integration!