Time to Move Student Enrollment Online

Student enrollment can take place in a number of ways—with varying degrees of convenience and success.

Registration the old-fashioned way, where students and parents fill up the school gymnasium and fill out thick packets by hand, presents challenges: inaccurate information from handwritten forms, an inconvenient trip for families, and unwanted costs and time spent by your staff.

There’s also online enrollment with an outdated, or home-grown, system. Most of the time, these systems aren’t integrated with a school or district’s other edtech products like the student information system, so data doesn’t securely flow into your main data management system.

But a shift to more convenient and modern online enrollment system can streamline the process and ease the burden on families and staff. By updating your student enrollment management technology, you can eliminate the need for your administrators and registrars to translate parent handwriting and re-enter it into your system—saving time and resources to refocus on improving student success during remote learning.

We spoke with several K-12 educators to find out how a switch to PowerSchool Enrollment or PowerSchool Enrollment Express has benefitted their districts. These two online enrollment products, part of the PowerSchool Student Information Cloud, offer online, configurable, and mobile-responsive platforms for admissions, school choice, and registration.

With a quality online enrollment system, you can trust that data is captured accurately and securely—without the guesswork of deciphering parent or student handwriting that may create errors down the line. You can also validate digital student data you’ve captured before, seamlessly delivering it to your SIS.

PowerSchool Enrollment provides mobile-responsive, intuitive online forms that families can access anywhere, from any device. Unlimited form-editing capabilities allow you to collect all necessary school and district-specific information on registration forms. With remote learning as part of the new norm, you can easily add new questions, such as consent to authorize students to learn from home.

For Illinois’ Reed-Custer Community School District #255, PowerSchool Enrollment makes state reporting more successful because they can customize the state-required information they gather.

“Something as easy as a mother’s maiden name—instead of us trying to track that information down, it’s much easier for us to just put it right in the registration and have a field that says, ‘Mother’s Maiden Name,’ then you’re done. When state reporting happens, we don’t have to worry about it because it’s done. We just pull that field for our state reporting,” says Luciana Kelaiditis, District Technology Personnel.

See Luciana speak more about this feature:

Shelley Wedel from Campbell Union School District adds, “We use forms to capture a lot of different information for departments. You can get very specific information for your district, including who needs devices, who has internet connectivity, and communicating fees to parents.”

Richard Bernadella, from Ohio’s Marysville Exempted Village School District, says that the 100% online PowerSchool Enrollment products make the process easier on his administrative team. They don’t have to type in any information, and instead, just view, verify, and submit student enrollment data entered by families.

He says the online process had been especially convenient during the COVID-19 pandemic. “You used to have parents come into an office and drop off or photocopy birth certificates, mortgage statements, and those kinds of things,” he says. “Now we have the capability of just having them take a picture with their phone and upload it. Then it’s available for your registrar or your secretaries to review and approve.”

Watch Richard speak more about PowerSchool Enrollment Express:

PowerSchool Enrollment products ensure parents can complete the entire enrollment or re-enrollment process from their homes, creating a more straightforward, efficient process, and enabling document uploads right to the online portal.

“Online enrollment was a huge time saver for families,” explains Denise DeJuliannie, Technology Director at Minnesota’s Eden Valley-Watkins School District. “We have a large farm community where there are 5-plus students presiding in any home. Before pre-registration with paper packs, families had to write down all of this same information for each and every one of their students.”

Now parents in this district no longer need to fill out redundant forms for each student, saving them time and frustration compared to dealing with 15- to 20-page packets with the old system. With online PowerSchool Enrollment, much of the family demographic information is pre-populated, allowing parents to skip through and only enter new info.

Hear more from Denise:

Online enrollment allows you to free up administrators from excessive data entry, which means they can refocus their time on other critical projects while eliminating unnecessary printing and mailing costs from your budget.

“In the past, our secretaries had to print multiple forms, stuff envelopes, mail them out to 1500 kids, and then wait for everything to come back and then re-enter everything based on handwriting and hoping the information was correct so we could use it,” says Luciana. “Just mailing out forms was an entire day-long project. We also set aside two nights where all the secretaries, district administrators, and school nurses would come in and handle late registration. Now, everything is handled online.”

Shelley Wedel, Student Information Manager at California’s Campbell Union School District, also remarks at the time her staff has saved by moving away from paper packets. She says, “In the past, secretaries had to hand-enter all of the information for each student. We used to have to go through every packet by hand to make sure everything was filled out. And now it’s pretty much one click and approve. Before, everything was going on paper—with envelopes, and stamps, and postage. Now, we’re not using paper forms, and we’re notifying parents electronically. That’s saving all of that paper cost.”

Here’s more of Shelley’s story:

The Switch to Online Enrollment

As schools and districts transition to digital systems, a modern online enrollment system makes a lot of sense. The benefits of moving enrollment online can help you save time and money, while giving parents and your staff a smoother, convenient process.