How Helper Helper Supports Ohio Schools
Ohio Success Story Cuyahoga Valley Christian Academy
Cuyahoga Valley Christian Academy · Private School
“Helper Helper's Canvas integration is a dream come true for me as the service learning coordinator at our school. Since volunteer hours are a required part of our curriculum, the app provides everything we need to encourage students to find opportunities, track their hours and report their progress. This app is the best one out there, and their support team is amazing.”
Cuyahoga Valley Christian Academy's mission is to “Educate and Cultivate Servants for Christ,” so service is part of the curriculum: every student in grades 6 through 12 is expected to serve 16 hours each school year. They serve in their churches, on campus, and with outside organizations, from Sunday school classrooms and soup kitchens to the trails of Cuyahoga Valley National Park and an orphanage in El Salvador. The school adopted Helper Helper in 2017 so students could sign up for service events and submit the hours they served on their own to be verified.
Logging hours got easier. Turning them into grades did not: staff were still sorting students by class and entering each grade into Canvas by hand so the school's report cards could pick it up. Service Learning Coordinator Eileen Hoffman worked with the Helper Helper team to lay out a fix, and the result was Helper Helper's Canvas integration. “We use the Helper Helper external tool in a Canvas assignment,” she says, “which gives our staff easy access to Helper Helper data, and links verified hours to our Student Information System.” Her advice to other schools: “You won't regret making the choice to use Helper Helper to encourage a volunteer spirit in your learning community.”
Integration Highlight: Helper Helper runs inside Canvas. Students open it from a course and are signed in automatically, class rosters stay in sync, and teachers see each student's progress on the assignment and sync it to the Canvas gradebook, where parents can follow along too.
More Ohio Schools Using Helper Helper
Helper Helper isn't only for students. The Jonathan Alder Athletic Boosters, the parent group behind the athletic programs at Jonathan Alder High School in Plain City, use it to sign parents up for volunteer shifts. Every hour a parent works at a concession stand earns $7 for the team of their choice.
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 Ohio schools, we sign your district's Student Data Privacy Agreement and comply with FERPA and Ohio's student data privacy law (Ohio Revised Code 3319.326, enacted by Senate Bill 29 of 2024), which keeps education records the property of the school district and bars vendors from selling them or using them for advertising.
Service Requirements in Ohio
Ohio has no statewide service hour requirement for graduation. Since the class of 2023, students have needed at least two of the state's twelve diploma seals to graduate, and one of the twelve is the Community Service Seal, earned by completing a community service project under guidelines adopted by the student's own district or school (R.C. 3313.6114). Districts that offer the seal decide for themselves how many hours it takes, which activities count, and how the service is documented. State law also lets districts add community service education to their programs, with special recognition on the diploma for an approved project (R.C. 3313.605). Christian and Catholic schools, honor societies, and service clubs set expectations of their own.
No requirement at your school?
Helper Helper isn't just for graduation requirements. It also tracks service for Christian and Catholic school service programs, National Honor Society chapters, Key Club, other student groups, and parent volunteer programs like booster clubs.
One Platform for Every Ohio Service Program
Ohio schools recognize service in different ways, and many run more than one program at once. Helper Helper handles all of them in one place:
- Community Service Seal: set a goal that matches your district's seal guidelines, see who is on pace each year, and pull a report of the seniors who have earned it
- Service built into coursework: connect Helper Helper to Canvas, so students log hours from inside a course and their progress reaches the gradebook
- Christian and Catholic school service programs: give each grade its own requirement, ask students for reflections on what each experience meant to them, and let churches and other community partners confirm the hours served with them
- NHS, Key Club, and student groups: advisors track only their own members on their own team, post service projects with sign-ups, and check students in on site with a QR code or validation key
- Booster clubs and parent volunteers: post concession stand and event shifts with sign-ups, and keep a record of every parent's volunteer hours
- Records that go with the student: every student leaves with a verified service transcript for college, scholarship, and job applications