Student Checklists for back-to-school - how do they work? What is your process?

Sondra Berry

Currently, we assign a number of school forms prior to the start of school for students and their parents to complete. I have seen several discussions regarding checklists for returning students to get back-to-school documentation and was wondering if someone who uses student checklists could give me insight as to their process.

One question I have- we have a number of school forms (located in Core and Academics) that parents and students complete. If we use a checklist to list the required school forms, does the system automatically mark the checklist step as completed when that particular school form is completed or does someone manually have to mark the completed school forms on the checklist? There are only two of us who gather all this information and I am trying to reduce our work effort not increase it and it would be a deal breaker if I had to manually check each and every account to indicate whether or not the items in the checklist were completed.

Thank you for any information you can provide.

Brian LeBlanc

Sondra Berry:
If we use a checklist to list the required school forms, does the system automatically mark the checklist step as completed when that particular school form is completed or does someone manually have to mark the completed school forms on the checklist?

It should, but our experience has been that it doesn't. We have an active trouble ticket on file with support dated May 12 to fix this, and they've sent it up the ladder to get it fixed but it hasn't been fixed yet. In the meantime, we are telling parents that they can confirm that the forms have been completed by going to Files & Forms and verifying that the forms are marked as completed. They can then dismiss the notification banner.

It's far from perfect, and I've had to respond to more parents than I can count regarding this issue, so hopefully a fix is identified soon but it's at least workable in the meantime.

Bernadette Shilliam

We tried checklists last year for the first time, and it was a bigger mess than I'm willing to work with. We have a form that collects parent information so we can do a basic background check if they want to volunteer, and because of the way the student checklists are, the form was also showing as required for the students to complete. Or, if one parent filled out the forms, they'd still show as outstanding for the other parent and I received numerous emails and phone calls about error messages from the other parent who was trying to access a form and couldn't because it was already submitted. It is a great concept - needs work.

Sondra Berry

Hmmm… That's not good! I had hoped checklists would help our parents to ensure all documentation we need is received for the start of school. Thank you for the feedback as it is very helpful.

Sondra Berry

Thank you, Brian. That is most disappointing to hear. I had hoped checklists would be a great way to organize parents for back to school paperwork. I hope support is able to fix this soon!

Virginia Shenk

@Sondra Berry I was searching to see if other schools had any more success than I did this year with checklists, but from this thread it looks like I'm not alone! Our admissions team has had great success with the checklists, so we were excited to try it out with our returning families. However, it was not nearly functional enough to effectively use them for returning families. Unless I manually updated the status, all the items remained as outstanding, which caused a lot of frustration and confusion. It was completely unmanageable to manually update items for nearly 500 families, so I ended up just deactivating the checklist. For it to really work for our school, it needs to update when forms are submitted and also have an option for parents to manually check off the status of tasks like signing up for emergency alerts, ordering uniforms, ordering consumables, etc. We won't be using the checklist until Blackbaud makes some significant enhancements.

Sarah Bienvenue

@Virginia Shenk
Hi Virginia, the bug regarding school forms not being marked as complete was fixed some time ago, as this thread is almost 4 months old. Are you still running into that issue? If so, that would be a new bug. Regarding allowing parents to mark their own checklist items as complete- that is something that we plan on updating soon.

Also wanted to just confirm with you- you mentioned having to manually mark checklist items complete, is this from the bulk action, or did you find that you're having to do it individually?

Thank you,

Sarah