Why K-12 Schools Should Manage Student Enrollment Online

Why should you manage student enrollment online? Bringing your process online offers an array of benefits.

From school leaders and staff to families and students, everyone benefits from online enrollment management.

With budgets under scrutiny more than ever, schools must work hard to minimize costs while still delivering a high-quality education. While the digital revolution is moving quickly in many industries, the K-12 school system is one area of comparably slow technological growth.

This is due in large part to the large number of students and the even more massive number of files, forms, and documents families must submit — files, forms, and documents that schools must then process.

An online platform makes it easy to eliminate physical forms and manage student enrollment in a timely, cost-effective manner.

Manage Your Student Enrollment Online

Student-related documentation has traditionally been done with paper and pen, meaning an enormous number of forms and documents need to be tracked and maintained during and after the enrollment process.

School admissions and enrollment — including application, lotteries and assignments, and registration — is one of the most costly, time-consuming tasks a school conducts.

The admissions process is also the first touch point a family has with the school they are applying to. And it’s important for schools to make a good first impression. These reasons make school admissions and enrollment great candidates for transitioning to online management.

Benefits of Online Enrollment Management Systems

The benefits of moving your enrollment process online are many:

• An online enrollment system can collect all the information into a central hub, making it easy to access and modify.
• Registration information is instantly added to the database without the need to enter the information into a registry by hand.
• This dramatically speeds up the registration process, freeing up employees to do the tasks that must be done by hand.
• You increase accuracy by cutting down on the number of data-entry errors, such as false addresses and relocated students.

Many charter and choice schools use a lottery and waitlist in their enrollment process. With a paper-based system, this process is error-prone and high risk.

• A single error could mean a student might not get into the school that would have significantly improved their life.
• An online lottery and waitlist management system can solve these problems using clear rules and priorities set to ensure registration is fair.
• Comprehensive audits can be performed to check the process and understand the details.

By incorporating several months’ or years’ worth of data, a predictive tool can produce actionable insights that a district can use to plan out its enrollment goals and resource allocation. These data include reports on the number of applications submitted, inactive applications, and demographic information.

Family Involvement in the Enrollment Process

With streamlined and digitized school admissions, parents can become more involved and better understand the registration process.

Helping parents understand this perspective will encourage family-teacher communications even after students start attending school, keeping them involved in their children’s education.

Family engagement is one of the most important benefits of such a system, because the more involved parents and guardians are, the better students perform in school. Schools can quickly and easily send families an email or text message, allowing them to respond immediately.

For hard-to-reach or inactive families, you can generate a list that would allow officials to personally reach out for formal communications, fostering an engaging communication process for all.

Increase Enrollment with SchoolMint Enroll

An online enrollment and management tool, such as SchoolMint Enroll, provides an efficient way to organize and manage school enrollment, saving you time and money.

By conducting school registration online, you can track enrollment numbers in real time. You can also compare these numbers against previous years or competing schools. SchoolMint Enroll can:

• Provide mobile enrollment access to families without a computer or broadband internet access.
• Support the languages spoken in your community, ensuring access for families whose first language isn’t English.
• Manage student enrollment, registration, and re-registration with an easy-to-use, digital platform.
• Save you the time and money associated with a traditional pen-and-paper enrollment process.