A parent taps “I can help” on a fall festival sign-up in the Bloomz calendar. Three weeks later a coordinator is still typing volunteer hours into a spreadsheet by hand, matching names against a sign-in sheet and hoping nobody got counted twice. Volunteer Hours already tracked time from front-desk sign-outs and manual staff entries. It never knew about the calendar sign-up itself — the two lived in different corners of the app. That gap is closed now, and two things schools have been asking for — a background-check record and a household hours quota — are folded into the same module.
The gap between claiming a slot and logging the hours
When a parent claims a Volunteer Help slot on the school calendar, staff can now see, right from that sign-up, who has claimed it and whose hours are already credited.
Staff can confirm a claimed sign-up and credit the hours. To make it quick, the slot’s length pre-fills the minutes, so a two-hour shift shows up as two hours by default — staff can always change the number before confirming.
A background check on file, and a notice before it lapses
Coordinating volunteers at a lot of schools already means tracking who has cleared a background check and when it needs renewing. Bloomz doesn’t run background checks — a school still obtains those through whatever agency or process it already uses. What’s new is a place to record what was obtained: the type of check, the date it cleared, and an expiration date if there is one. From that, Bloomz tracks whether a record reads cleared, expiring soon, or expired.
Each day, a notice goes out about volunteers whose clearance is coming up for renewal — sent only to the staff who coordinate volunteers at that school, never the wider staff roster and never families. A background-check record is staff-only information end to end; it’s not part of what a parent or the volunteer sees about their own account.
An optional household quota
Some schools ask every family to put in a set number of volunteer hours a year, counted per household rather than per parent. That’s now something a school can turn on: an optional hours target, plus a rollup that adds hours across the guardians who share a student instead of counting each parent separately. Schools that don’t use a quota see nothing different — both are optional, and leaving them off keeps Volunteer Hours working exactly as it did before.
What this doesn’t change
Volunteers who sign in at the front desk still have their hours logged automatically at sign-out — unchanged. What’s new applies to the calendar sign-up path specifically: staff confirm those claimed sign-ups and credit the hours. The daily clearance notice reaches coordinating staff, not families.
Volunteer Hours ships with Bloomz Coordination, and this is available wherever a school already has Coordination turned on — no add-on, no separate module to buy. To see it next to the rest of how Bloomz handles the everyday parts of the school day, visit Campus Life. And if the sign-up side of volunteering — the slots, the reminders, the reach into every family’s language — is the piece your school hasn’t solved yet, read Volunteer and Event Sign-Ups Without the Chaos.