Extracurricular Course request for afterschool programs

Lauren Marcus Eisenberg

Has anyone used Extracurricular course request as a sort of registration / signup for afterschool or elective programming?

Lauren Marcus Eisenberg

Really? No one uses Extracurricular Course requests for after (or before) school programming?

Scott Chrysler

@Lauren Marcus Eisenberg - We toyed around with it at my last school but never pulled the trigger on launching it. I had proposed we used it for upper and middle school students to sign up for clubs. I really liked the idea of using K12 to track student membership in clubs and give advisors a way to communicate “club stuff” to members. The middle school did set up the clubs as extracurricular activities and enrolled students but never used the request functionality.

Scott

Kelly Maddox

@Lauren Marcus Eisenberg We use SchoolPass, a BB partner, which allows parents to sign up their children for after-school programming.

Amanda Polson

@Lauren Marcus Eisenberg I am trying to set up something like this for our Aftercare program. I tried using the Activities section, but I'm running into trouble figuring out how to let families register. I'm interested to hear what your approach is…

Amanda Polson

@Lauren Marcus Eisenberg We are going to try using the Activities section for our Aftercare program this year. I'm not sure yet if it will work well - I am already running into several limitations that we will just have to deal with.

We offer Aftercare as an annual contract (either full time or just certain days per week), by the month (again, every day or just some days), and as a drop in.

I've set up each month as an Activities term. Then I created classes and made sections for each day. I am setting it up so the course request for each month is available about mid-way through the previous month. If families want to register by the month, they will fill out the course request, using the notes section to indicate which days. For annual contracts I'm just having people let me know what days and I will manually enter those children.

I'm hoping this will be helpful for parents to be able to see on their end that their child is registered, they can view by month and day. And the teacher will be able to see who they have each day.

The main problem is the drop in students. I can't really think of a way to add them day by day. We would love to be able to use use an attendance report to help with billing, but I guess we will have to stick with the paper sign in sheets for those. The whole thing is also a lot of set up work/time, and I keep questioning if any of it is really worthwhile, but we are giving it a try.

Lauren Marcus Eisenberg

@Amanda Polson We use the woefully inadequate “Registration forms & attendees” in School website > Events. For a hundred reasons, it doesn't fit the bill.

Amanda Polson

@Lauren Marcus Eisenberg Last year we used a form and I just had to check the forms and enter them on a spreadsheet to track. We don't have the school website functionality so I havent tried those specific forms.

Amanda Polson

@Amanda Polson Just wanted to add to this that as I was setting it all up, I realized if I make all the months available for registration right away, families who want to sign up for a full annual schedule can do it through the Course Requests as well, they just add requests for all the months. So I've opened the full year and have each month “term” course request close a few days before the end of the previous month. On the parent side I think this is going to work fairly well. And I like that once a child is enrolled, the month and day show on their profile.

Also wanted to mention that I'm running into all sorts of annoyances with the Activities. The main one of course is that with 5 sections (days) set for each month of the school year, the Aftercare teacher has several pages of groups, and they default to a weird order. So trying to find rosters for each day is going to be annoying.

Another issue is that I can't figure out how to tie the Activity schedule to days/times, so it does not show on the teacher's schedule. That would help with accessing the groups in the system, but I can't figure out how to make it happen.

Mayerlin Fana

@Kelly Maddox do you have time for a call? I would love to learn more how you are using school pass for after-school programs?