DCPS Central Office removed community service hours on many high school students’ Aspen accounts earlier this month due to what Jackson-Reed counselors described as a documentation error.
During a district-wide evaluation of community service forms, Central Office found that many uploaded hours lacked proper documentation. “If there’s not any documentation, it did not happen,” said Shyra Gregory, the Director of Scheduling, Transcripts, and Academic Records Support.
For students to regain their removed hours, they must recreate or resubmit their community service forms. This includes re-obtaining a supervisor’s signature from the location of service. Senior Francesca Krevat expressed frustration, especially because she was “not made aware of the situation.”
“I don’t remember my community service hours from three years ago,” she said. Krevat added that she didn’t know which hours she had lost, posing an obstacle when choosing which hours to resubmit. Krevat reported that her total hours dropped from 68 to 44.
However, sophomore Silas Groves, whose hours were also erased, said he hoped he would not be as heavily impacted because he “took pictures before submitting them so they wouldn’t get lost.”
This is the first time that hours have been removed from Aspen. Before COVID, forms were physically brought to the Central Office rather than digitized. Since COVID, DCPS has gradually returned to requiring students to complete community service hours. As a result, the process for monitoring forms was briefly halted.
“We noticed there was a huge issue last year when we began to do verification,” Gregory said. She said the problem prompted Central Office to begin the process earlier this year. “Rather than waiting until the end, we [have] started doing a massive cleanup so everyone is clear about the status of students,” Gregory said.
In the first few years following COVID, specific JR administrators were assigned the job of filing community service hours, not counselors. During those years, hours were uploaded that did not have the attached documentation file. When DCPS Central Office then reviewed those hours this year in early December, they discovered the incomplete submissions, which then caused them to remove hours from students’ Aspen.
Aspen’s infrastructure allowed JR administrators to submit hours without attaching the file, enabling submissions that lacked evidence. “Moving forward there will not be the option to enter community service hours without documentation; it will not save in the Aspen student information system,” Gregory said.
This year, the task falls under counselors’ responsibilities. Each form must be manually entered from the physical document into Aspen, which takes up to 15 minutes. “It is painstaking,” 12th-grade counselor Patrice Maites said.
The counselors are now sorting through each student’s folder to ensure all forms in their possession are uploaded. Due to the large number of forms, some have been lost in the past four years. Maites said she believes there should be a different process for uploading hours, such as having students electronically submit their hours. “Aspen has that opportunity but it’s not been further investigated,” she said.
Gregory noted that this removal is the first step of a longer process, where Central Office will review all documentation to ensure that the forms uploaded align with the hours entered in Aspen and are properly filled out.
