Students in New Haven Public Schools put 25,000 hours of muscle into the City of New Haven, Conn. each year. Now with the addition of x2VOL, administrators who track and verify those student service hours won’t even break a sweat. Recently, the district and New Haven Promise selected x2VOL from intelliVOL, to ease the management and reporting of student service hours.
x2VOL is an online tracking and reporting platform for schools to manage the hours students give to community service. New Haven Promise subscribed to x2VOL for the school district to make it easier to verify and track student service hours given to charities. School administrators can monitor activities, post opportunities, track and approve their students’ volunteer hours and service learning projects. It also connects nonprofits more closely to schools, allowing them to notify students of volunteer opportunities and giving students a one-click way to sign up and record their work.
New Haven Promise is unique among community Promise scholarship models because it requires students to give 40 of hours of service to the city, in addition to having good grades and attendance to earn their scholarships. “We were about to build our own system when we discovered x2VOL and found it had all the features we needed,” said Dr. Dolores Garcia-Blocker, director of college and career pathways at New Haven Public Schools. “We were thrilled to find that x2VOL would manage the student data and provide a verification path that is so critical to our scholarship program.”
Being able to verify the hours students give is one of the most significant factors in bringing x2VOL to the district. With up to $4 million per year going to scholarships, funders wanted to be certain student hours are valid, verifiable and address actual needs. Nonprofits post needs and specific type of work and hours to be filled in x2VOL’s dashboard. Students can search for the type of work or time period they are available and quickly sign up. The old system required phone calls and emails and often resulted in missed appointments. There is a mobile app for on-the-go reporting for the iPhone® and for Android™ devices.
“We need a ‘gold standard’ accountability system for community service because we will distribute millions of dollars each year,” said Patricia Melton, executive director of New Haven Promise. “x2VOL will give us a way to verify student service hours, where the student worked, how long and what they learned from the experience. This is critical information for a successful city-wide program like New Haven Promise.”
x2VOL is being implemented across the district this spring and will be fully deployed for the 2014-15 school year.
