Featured California School Central Catholic High School
Central Catholic High School
“It is the best way to post and keep track of service hours. Helper Helper is a very efficient and effective tracking system.”
Central Catholic High School in Modesto tracked service hours on paper before Helper Helper, and four years of paper for every student added up. “It was very difficult to keep track of paper trails for each student in the course of four years at high school,” Tanya Velazquez told us. The school's diocese requires students to serve in the community, and Central Catholic layers its own required service commitments on top of that. Today the whole program runs in the app: the school posts every service opportunity ahead of time, students sign up and record hours from their phones, and staff can pull up any student's four-year record in seconds. “Biggest benefit is the easy mobile access to post events, sign up for service hours, and record hours per student.”
Hours in Helper Helper carry weight at Central Catholic. Students must have their service recorded in the app to stay eligible for sports, and when they apply for leadership positions they submit a copy of their Helper Helper hours to show their service in the community. Goals keep the requirement in front of them all year. “It keeps the students engaged,” Velazquez says, and the numbers bear that out: service hours have gone up since the school moved to the app. Staff time has gone the other way. “It has been helpful in keeping track of hours for each student throughout their four years of school and removing all paper trails.”
Students Tell the School's Story
Students at Central Catholic post photos of their service and write a reflection on how it fulfills the mission of the school. The photos come back around: students use them in class presentations of their service hours, and the school uses them on its website and social media to show families what its students do in the community.
How Helper Helper Supports California Service Programs
Family Volunteer Hours at California Private Schools
Many California private schools ask families, not just students, to serve. Six schools in the Sacramento area alone run their family volunteer programs on Helper Helper: Jesuit High School, Victory Christian Schools, St. Joseph Catholic School in Auburn, St. Ignatius Parish School, Presentation School, and Our Lady of the Assumption School. Before the switch, most of them were improvising. Victory Christian had “rigged the form system” of a donation platform to log hours instead of dollars, and St. Joseph was pairing SignUp Genius with an Excel sheet, which its volunteer coordinator calls “painful to say the least.” Staff at both fielded a steady stream of emails from parents asking how many hours they had left.
In Helper Helper each family is a team with its own goal, so a family's home screen shows the percentage of its commitment completed. Parents find shifts and sign up in the app, get reminders before each one, and check in on site with a coordinator's validation key. Class parties and field trip chaperoning that used to go unrecorded get logged by the parent and validated by the teacher with one tap. Schools that track student and family hours keep both in one system. Read more on our parent volunteering page.
Featured Family Program Jesuit High School
Jesuit High School · Catholic High School
Jesuit High School in Carmichael asks every family for 25 volunteer hours a year, counted from May 1 through April 30, with a fee for hours left unserved. More than 1,600 parents manage that commitment in Helper Helper. They browse the school's shifts under Find Opportunities, sign up, and get reminder emails two days and two hours before each one. On site they check in with the coordinator and enter a validation key code, and anything served outside a posted shift goes in through Add Past Commitment. Boosters and Loyola Guild events, from the Christmas tree lot to Grad Night, give families plenty of ways to get there, and every family can see exactly where it stands against its 25 hours.
“One HUGE win is that this has been a consistent method for us to post and share needs at our school. Before Helper Helper, we didn't have a good way to communicate the needs. Now that families are learning the new process, it is picking up speed.”
“Each family is set up as a team and assigned a goal aligned with their tuition contract. Their personalized homepage displays the percentage of their requirement completed, giving families clear, ongoing visibility into their progress.”
More California Schools Using Helper Helper
Acalanes High School · Public High School
Acalanes High School in Lafayette recognizes its volunteers with two awards run by the Acalanes Parents Club's Community Service Team. The Volunteer Service Award goes to any student with 30 or more hours in the award year, and the Excellence in Community Service Award, earned once in a high school career for 300 or more hours over four years, comes with a graduation honor cord. Every hour has to be logged in the Helper Helper app within a month of the service and verified by a volunteer coordinator, so the club confirms each award from the app's records instead of collecting forms. The school's Key Club chapter uses Helper Helper as well.
Getting Started
Helper Helper integrates directly with the student information systems (SIS) and single sign-on (SSO) providers your school already uses, including Google for Education, Microsoft, PowerSchool, ClassLink, Canvas, and more. Students sign in with their existing school credentials and rosters sync automatically.
Already tracking hours in spreadsheets, a homegrown database, or another platform? We'll import your existing data into Helper Helper at no additional charge so students don't lose credit for hours they've already completed.
Same-Day Support from Real People
No chatbots or ticket queues. When you need help, you’ll hear back the same day from Krista, Chelsea, or Matt. Our team knows schools and provides guided onboarding and Zoom trainings to get your program up and running.
Simple, Affordable Pricing
Helper Helper starts at $500 per year for up to 200 students and includes everything you need. Additional students cost $2.50 per student per year.
- Hour verification & reporting
- Goal tracking & real-time progress
- Service portfolios for students
- iOS, Android & web apps
Schedule a Demo
Pick a time that works for you. We’ll walk through how Helper Helper can serve your school or district and answer any questions you may have.
HECVAT-assessed, FERPA-compliant, encrypted in-transit and at-rest, hosted on AWS infrastructure.
This designation benefits both parties: for your school or district, it means you can deploy Helper Helper without the administrative burden of collecting individual parent consent for every student — the same way you onboard other essential technology platforms. For Helper Helper, it means we are held to the same strict data-handling standards as your own employees, giving your community confidence that student records are protected by the full weight of federal privacy law.
The FTC provides guidance confirming that schools may consent on behalf of parents in the educational context under COPPA. Please request to see our Notice of Data Practices for Children Under 13 and our Privacy Policy for further details.
The HECVAT was developed by the higher education community (EDUCAUSE) and is widely used by colleges and universities to assess the IT security, data protection, and privacy practices of third-party software vendors before adoption. While originally designed for higher ed, its comprehensive framework is equally valuable for K–12 schools and districts looking for a rigorous, standardized way to evaluate whether a vendor meets their security and compliance requirements.
AWS operates the most widely adopted and trusted cloud infrastructure in the world, with security practices that meet or exceed the requirements of federal agencies, financial institutions, and healthcare providers. Their data centers are protected by 24/7 on-site security, biometric access controls, redundant power and networking, and continuous monitoring.
AWS is independently audited against the most rigorous standards in the industry — including SOC 1, SOC 2, SOC 3, ISO 27001, FedRAMP, and PCI DSS — and provides industry-leading uptime guarantees backed by a 99.99% service-level agreement. This means your school can count on Helper Helper being available when students and advisors need it.
Administrators can be scoped to specific groups, schools, grade levels, or graduating classes — an NHS advisor sees only their NHS members, a school principal sees only their school, and a district coordinator sees the full district.
Outside community partners receive organization admin roles that let them post their own volunteer opportunities, manage sign-ups, and confirm attendance for events they host, without any visibility into student records, other organizations’ events, or school-internal data.
Helper Helper is fully FERPA-compliant, giving your community confidence that student records are protected by the full weight of federal privacy law. We never sell or share student data.
For California schools, we sign your district's Student Data Privacy Agreement and comply with California's Student Online Personal Information Protection Act (SOPIPA, BPC §22584) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).
Why Verified Hours Matter in California
California's competitive UC and CSU application landscape, combined with district graduation requirements and the optional State Seal of Civic Engagement, means a student's service record needs to stand up to scrutiny from multiple audiences. Helper Helper's tamper-proof validation and official transcripts give students and schools confidence that every hour is documented and verifiable.
No other platform offers as many ways to validate service: QR codes, validation keys, supervisor signatures, and third-party coordinator confirmations. Whether students are working toward LAUSD's 40-hour requirement, SFUSD's 100-hour goal, a diocesan service commitment, or the Seal of Civic Engagement, every hour holds up under review.
Not subject to a service requirement?
We also power service hour tracking for National Honor Society chapters, Key Club organizations, private high schools with their own community service programs, and parent volunteer programs across California.