<p>How does one track community service/volunteer hours throughout the high schools years? My son is only a freshman, so I am trying to stay ahead of the curve. Do you just keep a spiral notebook as a log? Do they need to be separated by the type of service hours? I mean, by where they were served?</p>
<p>This probably sounds "bad," but is there a certain number of hours one should strive for per year?</p>
<p>Thanks.</p>
<p>Keep track? You indeed are a forward thinker, Hoggirl.</p>
<p>Most people don’t even think about what might be required later, so at application time they just make a guess. This is one of the reasons I have disliked the emphasis on public service (hard to estimate and nearly impossible for someone else to verify).</p>
<p>If you want to keep track, you could start a resume file for your son and keep a running tally there. It will be helpful once you reach the college and scholarship application stage.</p>
<p>Hoggirl,</p>
<p>Keep a log of activities and hours. Set up a column so that an objective person, such as the manager of the food bank you or your kids volunteers at, can sign it now and then. It might say “spent 10 hours helping feed the less fortunate for T-giving,” as a log entry for example. </p>
<p>Many CS/VH’s are earned as part of a group or club or something so there is someone in charge of running it. That is the person that signs the log or perhaps writes a TY letter of some type that would be useful later for college apps and so forth. </p>
<p>Also, your school’s guidance department no doubt can verify and/or mail in logs and/or records you give them for state “Bright Futures” or “Hope” type scholarships. Check with them on this if you can.</p>
<p>I keep track of all ECs and awards for D2. At our school there is a form to fill out and that way, I get to keep a copy and such. I know with D1, by the time we get to senior year she had forgotten what, when, who she served as a volunteer in 9-11 grade.</p>
<p>For several scholarships, S needed very specific information about his community service participation. It had been tracked through his troop’s scouting software and I used that information to build a spreadsheet. I use the same one to track D’s hours and developed it further for the Coca-Cola scholarship, which first asks for the hours one way and then for semi round, wanted them split out a little differently. I"d be happy to share the simple spreadsheet I use if you’ll pm me your email address - it’s in excel.</p>
<p>I think a simple spread sheet is a convenient way to track hours, but we never did. My kids didn’t do that much and it was easy to figure out what they had done when we went to fill out college applications. You definitely want to sort them, in our experience the hours didn’t matter it was what you did and if they helped tell a story about who you are. My older son’s community service all related to computer science, while my younger son did more of a variety. One related to his interest in history, but math tutoring was actually sort of counter intuitive as math was not obviously his strong suit (but he really understood it, a fact made clear in the letter of recommendation from his math teacher.)</p>
<p>HS graduation requirements for my 2 kids were a minimum of 30 hours of community service from 9th through March of 12th grades. A form is filled with date, hours, description of service, and paragraph of how the experience affected you. This form is signed by adult service coordinator and turned in to guidance office. Volunteer hours appear on students’ transcript.</p>
<p>thanks for all the replies. We will definitely start keeping a log. It’s already a bit challenging trying to remember what ds did last semester, so I can only imagine what it would be like trying to recreate three years’ worth in the fall of one’s senior year.</p>