School Administration
The following text is a work in progress.
Schools need the Volunteer and Leadership program to bring in funding; to streamline the student counselors’ monitoring of volunteering tasks, including managing the students’ service hours; and to increase the schools’ grade on a national level.
College admission is one of the key factors to increase the school grade to receive additional funding. As more college admissions staff looks for extended, connected service and values leaders who fund raise, the V&L program provides students an easy way to make their college applications more impressive while delivering the school personnel easy administration for the school.
Different states impose different requirements surrounding volunteering: some require service hours to graduate; some have restricted programs in place; in some, students receive credit hours for volunteering; in others, the state asks school districts to decide whether or not service hours are required for graduation. Our system manages and tallies these volunteering hours based on specific school and state requirements, making it easy for the guidance counselor or school principal to administrate the students’ service hours. V&L conforms to the restrictions put in place by the Board of Educations in 29 states
Schools will receive help for establishing and maintaining a web presence for volunteering and leadership. From the V&L here will be links to all schools
V&L welcomes to the club all kinds of tertiary education institutions as, for example:
- Colleges
- Universities
- Vocational Schools
- Academies
- Seminaries
- Conservatories
- Institutes of technology
These organizations may choose to become members at a basic level and only receive simple dashboard functionality like accepting student reports in a standard format for uniform categorization of volunteering acts; however, we prefer to incorporate them as active partners of V&L and to fully engage them in the club activities and governance.
Partnership can be achieved at different levels of engagement, identified as Silver, Gold or Platinum levels, with different entitlements: [This needs work; add more differentiators among levels.]
- Silver:
- School showcase
- Permanent School ad in the V&L page
- Co-sponsorship of a discussion group: e.g. value of V&L to admission; leadership workshops, etc.
- School may publish their preferences in terms of volunteering, service involvement, leadership, charity drives, etc.
- Maximum 1 linked web page
- Access to V&L board to describe school preferences and restrictions (e.g. service may not include political activities) in terms of volunteering.
- Link to College sponsored pages
- Gold:
- School showcase
- Permanent School ad in the V&L page
- Co-sponsorship of 2 discussion groups:
- School may publish their preferences in terms of volunteering, service involvement, leadership, charity drives, etc..
- Special ad. with logo in V&L site
- Maximum 3 linked web pages
- Access to V&L board to describe school preferences and restrictions (e.g. service may not include political activities) in terms of volunteering.
- Link to College sponsored pages
- Platinum:
- School showcase
- Permanent School ad in the V&L page
- Co-sponsorship of 4 discussion groups:
- School may publish their preferences in terms of volunteering, service involvement, leadership, charity drives, etc..
- Special ad. with logo in V&L site
- Maximum 5 linked web pages
- Access to V&L board to describe school preferences and restrictions (e.g. service may not include political activities) in terms of volunteering.
- Link to College sponsored pages
Institutional actors may assume distinct roles depending on preferences and partnership level, which will also affect the functionality accessible from each dashboard. The following are possible dashboard roles for an academic institution:
- General Administration
- Admission office
- Institute representative
- Professor
The General Administration office can delegate some or all functionality to the Admission Office or to the General Representative. They may also give Teachers and Professors direct access to high school reports (limited by privacy determinations.)
The Representative role is reserved for partnered Institutions; it will be the main contact for all interactions between V&L and the College.
The V&L Club and Partner Institutions can establish special agreements for the full or partial accreditation of courses and micro –certifications, sponsored by V&L and/or a partner business. [A very interesting model is the Euclid Consortium established years ago by President Faustine A. Touadera from the University of Bangui, in the Central African Republic].
Educational institutions that register with V&L are immediately added to the list of participant tertiary schools, and all high school applicants in the club and across the nation, can start sending their reports online; this is a level of exposure that may prove extremely convenient for the institution.
Registered Institutions use
- a unified badge-metric for meaningful comparison of V&L merits across the nation, and
- a unified reporting system that captures those unified metrics but allows the insertion of multimedia attachments by the students that can operate as creative differentiators.
HOW WE HELP STUDENTS
The system tracks students’ hours of service and helps them building customizable reports for each event with a detail of hours spent in preparation, management, summary and reflection; event reports may also include multimedia attachments, to let students describe their individual approach to volunteering. For event leaders, the platform offers checklists with step-by-step guidelines for the creation and coordination of service events; it also includes mailer templates that can be used to promote a service event or to invite others to join. V&L delivers work flow task lists for the organization of events, for serving in an activity, and for reaching to business leaders to seek for support. We focus on transient students to help them connect, acclimate, and quickly on-board with their new academia. We provide learning opportunities that include finance, e-commerce, web design, IT data conversion and programming, English as a second language, public speaking, independent study, private instruction, team sports, performing groups, internships, and work study to prepare the students for life skills not traditionally taught in the current school curriculum. Students carry their profile from one school to another and maintain connections with former classmates, business contacts, and teachers. This is a valuable feature at application time when it is necessary to obtain letters of recommendation! V&L delivers an effortless, intuitive platform to support all actors in volunteering events and fundraisers, promoting leadership and service, advancing skill sets, and making connections that build a resume for higher learning and job applications. We make the platform interesting and self-motivating by delivering not only credit hours of service to their schools, but also assigning system badges for Leaders, Service, Business, Extra-Curricular Education, or Not School Focused activities. These tasks may be either locally organized by students or may span across multiple systems and be globally available for club members.
WHY VOLUNTEER AND LEADERSHIP?
Local businesses look to schools to provide applicants for volunteering work and for part time employment with the expectation that, once students graduate, they would have a pool of potential hires. 31 million hires between the ages of 16-24 take place in the United States every year. Businesses run charity campaigns every year, too. The labor force participation rate (the proportion of the population that is employed or looking for work) for recent high school graduates enrolled in college was 39.8 percent. Recent high school graduates not enrolled in college in the fall of 2017 were much more likely than enrolled graduates to be in the labor force (67.4 percent, compared with 39.8 percent). The labor force participation rate of youth not enrolled in school was at 79.5 percent (October 2017). Business will pay for membership services and event postings to attract students to their businesses for part time hire and full time hire once they graduate.
Volunteer and Leadership provides a fast track to get in touch with these students and young adults!