Georgia Success Story Episcopal Day School
Episcopal Day School · Independent Episcopal School
“Helper Helper came at an ideal time for our school as we expanded our commitment to service learning across the entire community. By instituting three ‘Serve Weeks’ each year, our students have meaningful opportunities to serve both within our school and throughout the broader community, and Helper Helper makes it easy to organize, communicate, and document that impact. In our first year, middle school students logged 1,078 service hours, strengthening students' connection to others and helping them see how their time and talents can make a real difference.”
Episcopal Day School in Augusta was founded in 1944 and serves children of all faiths from age two and a half through eighth grade. Service is part of how the school describes itself: “What defines us is our quest to discover how we are each uniquely called to serve the world.” When EDS set out to expand service learning across its whole community, it built the school year around three Serve Weeks, set times when students serve both inside the school and out in the wider community.
Three Serve Weeks a year means a lot of moving parts: projects to organize, students and families to keep informed, and hours to document once the work is done. Liz McKibben, the school's Director of Technology and Dean of Students, says Helper Helper arrived “at an ideal time” for that work. Each project can be posted as an opportunity with its own sign-up, messages and reminders reach the people involved, and every hour lands in a record the school can report on. In the program's first year, middle school students logged 1,078 service hours.
How Helper Helper Supports Georgia Schools
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 Georgia schools, we sign your district's Student Data Privacy Agreement and comply with FERPA and Georgia's Student Data Privacy, Accessibility, and Transparency Act (O.C.G.A. §20-2-660 through 20-2-668).
Georgia Schools Using Helper Helper
Service Requirements in Georgia
Georgia has no statewide service hour requirement for graduation, but the state makes room for service in several ways. Community Service is on the state's list of funded high school electives, State Board of Education rules name service learning as one of the experience-based options in every student's individual graduation plan, and two state diploma seals ask for documented hours: the Civic Engagement Diploma Seal (50 hours, at least 15 of them in civic engagement) and the International Skills Diploma Seal (20 hours of service with an international focus). Everything else is decided locally. Atlanta Public Schools, for example, requires 75 hours of community service to graduate, and many independent and faith-based schools build service into every grade.
Not subject to a service requirement?
Helper Helper isn't just for graduation requirements. We also power service hour tracking for National Honor Society and NJHS chapters, Key Club organizations, and independent and faith-based schools across Georgia that run their own service programs.
One Platform for Every Georgia Service Program
Georgia schools recognize service in different ways, and many run more than one program at once. Helper Helper handles all of them in one place:
- District and school graduation requirements: set a goal for each graduating class, with yearly benchmarks inside a four-year total, and see which students are behind long before senior year
- Georgia diploma seals: custom categories keep civic engagement hours separate from community service, so a student working toward the Civic Engagement Diploma Seal can see both counts, and international service can be tagged for the International Skills Diploma Seal
- Serve Weeks and days of service: post every project ahead of time, take sign-ups, and check students in on site with a QR code or validation key
- NHS, NJHS, Beta Club, and Key Club chapters: put each chapter on its own team so advisors track only their members, from middle school through senior year
- Independent and faith-based school programs: students can add photos and write reflections on what each experience meant to them, and every student leaves with a verified service transcript