When it’s time to create an enrollment strategy for your school, how do you gather and analyze data to optimize student enrollment and plan staffing for the upcoming school year?
Historically, the only options were paper-intensive, time-consuming, and inefficient.
Even if today you manage your various enrollment processes via individual Google forms and spreadsheets (which we wholly recommend against), these methods leave considerable room for human error and don’t lend themselves easily to high-quality, efficient enrollment data analysis.
Thankfully, now schools have access to online and mobile-responsive enrollment systems that can help them get a better picture of how enrollment is shaping up — in no time at all.
Get a Clear, Real-Time View of Student Enrollment
Without an online system that can centrally store, manage, and organize enrollment data, it can be hard to get a clear understanding of how enrollment and re-enrollment are shaping up each year.
Some of our partner schools note that before they moved to our student enrollment system, SchoolMint Enroll, doing next-year planning was like chasing a moving target: they just didn’t (and couldn’t) know how many applicants and re-enrolling students to expect in the fall.
Now, with SchoolMint Enroll’s application and student registration dashboards, charter schools and districts can view the number of prospective students progressing through each stage of the enrollment and registration process in real time.
This data can be used to improve enrollment outreach, capture shifting population and choice trends, and help schools make better staffing decisions earlier in the year.
Analyze Trends in Recruitment, Enrollment, and Registration
In districts and other large school networks, transferring data from individual schools to the central enrollment office can often be inefficient, time-consuming, and frustrating for everyone involved.
People working in school operations and network administration need accurate and timely enrollment updates to inform reporting, budgeting, staffing, and strategic planning.
They’re responsible for performing sophisticated analyses of all student enrollment data, and before online enrollment systems became widely available, doing this type of analytical work was anything but easy.
Today, with SchoolMint Enroll, these school personnel can:
- Work with an online, cloud-based enrollment system to better understand their current student enrollment numbers.
- Determine where student enrollment is projected to go in upcoming years based on data from previous years.
- Access predictive enrollment analytics based on census data and other relevant information.
If you’re still spending weeks or months analyzing enrollment data for your district or network, these solutions will make a world of difference for you and your school community.
Not only can you access a clear picture of enrollment using a streamlined online and mobile system but you can also analyze recruitment trends.
For example, SchoolMint’s online and mobile enrollment software, SchoolMint Enroll, features a report that shows the top referral sources driving recruitment.
Such sources could include:
You can customize these reports to match your needs or leverage the data contained within the enrollment system to answer other questions.
And since this enrollment data is organized in a single place within an automated application and registration system, staff can analyze enrollment data in granular detail — by grade, by school, by approval status, even by school preference if applicable — to get the desired information on the spot.
Understand Family Demographics within Your School Boundaries
Schools need to understand their families’ demographics to meet legal/reporting requirements, improve outreach to families, and potentially improve services and resources for parents living in the area.
Accordingly, your district or school may want to better understand how well you’re meeting the needs of families. The reports provided in SchoolMint Enroll’s mobile-friendly enrollment system can help with that.
For example:
- One network of charter schools uses SchoolMint to find out whether parents of current students are members of the military, which has school funding implications.
- Hernando County School District (HCSD) must know which students are children of active-duty military personnel who have been forcibly relocated per orders as well as children who have been relocated in the foster care system. These students must be given priority in the district lottery process. SchoolMint Enroll helps HCSD easily identify those children.
Similarly, schools may look at how many kids in their schools are living with grandparents or in a temporary living situation, as that can help with planning and prioritizing social support services.
Many districts and schools need to have access to such data to fulfill state reporting requirements or improve their marketing outreach as well.
Having timely access to the right information can help them remain in compliance, perform their core functions more efficiently, and build a strong community of informed, involved parents.
Gain Insights into School Enrollment
For districts, networks, and schools that are impacted by demographic changes in their area or adapting to changes in school choice environments, access to accurate enrollment information is critical.
With a better handle on enrollment trends and statistics, districts can:
- Better understand where on the map they should consider opening a new school.
- Determine where a bus route should go based on where students live.
- View student demographics for the area of a new school that has been proposed.
- Decide how best to optimize their budget based on enrollment trends.
These insights can help in conversations with the board to gain approval for such growth plans or with the local governing authority in the public school context. Better data provides schools with the ability to make informed choices about their future direction.
When making important decisions, it’s essential to have timely, accurate, and relevant data at your fingertips in a form that is both easy to understand and actionable. Having all the data you need in one place and at your fingertips also helps you perform ad hoc analyses as needed.
By taking advantage of the intelligent reporting that an online and mobile enrollment system can offer and combining it with the predictive enrollment analytics of a software like SchoolMint Insights, your district can
With user-friendly new technology, your life will be easier; your data will be accurate, timely, and accessible; and your decisions will be based on a solid grasp of this critical enrollment data and student information.
Learn how our comprehensive enrollment software for districts can significantly enhance your district’s strategic development.
