Service Requirements in Iowa
Iowa does not set a statewide community service requirement for graduation. Instead, state law lets the board of any public school district or nonpublic school require service learning as a condition of graduation or for a service-learning endorsement on the diploma. Many Iowa high schools also honor service at graduation with a Silver Cord, typically earned with 100 to 200 documented volunteer hours over four years.
No district requirement at your school?
Helper Helper isn't just for required programs. We also power service hour tracking for National Honor Society chapters, Key Club organizations, Catholic and private high schools, and scholarship programs across Iowa.
Iowa Success Story Independence Community School District
Independence Community School District · Silver Cord Program
“Independence Community School District has transformed its service culture with Helper Helper. Students now discover and sign up for volunteer opportunities with ease, staff spend far less time coordinating logistics, and the district can clearly showcase the real impact its students make in the community. What used to feel scattered is now streamlined, empowering, and deeply connected.”
Kristy Ward knows the old way firsthand. When she was a student at Independence, volunteers signed in on clipboards at events and staff typed the hours into spreadsheets later. Illegible handwriting and transfer errors meant frequent mistakes, and plenty of miscommunication between students, staff, and the organizations they served.
Today Kristy runs the district's Silver Cord program, and the clipboards are gone. Students find and sign up for volunteer opportunities in the app, track their progress toward the cord in real time, and rarely need help navigating it. Local organizations post opportunities and track their volunteers directly, so staff no longer chase signatures or reconcile mismatched records.
Helper Helper was already in place when Kristy took over, which made the handoff painless. "It was super easy to step into the coordinator role without having to worry about managing a bunch of paper and spreadsheets," she says. With custom service categories and reporting, the district can see which kinds of service students do most, spot the gaps, and share its community impact with families, the school board, and local media.
How Helper Helper Supports Iowa Schools
One Platform for Every Iowa Service Program
Iowa schools recognize service in different ways, and many run more than one program at once. Helper Helper handles all of them in one place:
- Silver Cords and honor cords: set a four-year goal of 100, 200, or any number of hours and see who is on track long before senior recognition
- Annual and graduation requirements: run a yearly requirement alongside a cumulative cord goal, and count hours or completed experiences, with no extra spreadsheets
- Catholic and faith-based programs: custom categories separate parish, ministry, and community service, and students can write reflections on what each experience meant to them
- Teams for every advisor: put each student on a team so teachers, advisors, and counselors can check in on their own group and follow up with anyone falling behind
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 Iowa schools, we sign your district's Student Data Privacy Agreement and comply with Iowa's student online personal information protection law (Iowa Code §279.71).
Iowa Schools Using Helper Helper
