Managing Grade Level Waitpools in Enrollment Management

Trevor Bullock

Hello everyone, I wanted to pose a question here and see how other users are managing student waitpools right now in enrollment management. Currently, we are using the candidate checklist to manage waitpools by adding a status. However, if some grades have no waitpool, those students would currently have to still pass through that status even though they are not going into a waitpool. The goal is to ultimately be able to pull a list or use the SKY reporting dashboard to tell us how many kids we have in waitpool at any given time. This would help a lot in capacity planning and contacting those families when their spots are ready. Any and all ideas would be appreciated!

Deanna Thompson

@Trevor Bullock
We added a School Decision of “Waitlist”, which indicates that the student is admissible, but we do not currently have space.

Brian LeBlanc

@Trevor Bullock We do the same as @Deanna Thompson where we enter a decision of Waitlist when a student would be accepted but there is no space at the moment. Our waitlist is very fluid, because we offer priority to siblings of enrolled students as well as staff children, and other factors also come into play, so the “official” waitlist order is not held within EMS but rather within a Google spreadsheet that is populated from a daily data export from a candidates list.

We also have a “waitlist hold” internal decision for students who were accepted in a grade where there is space but they are not able to enroll at the present (they are moving from out of town and need to defer their start date is the most common use for this status).

Happy to demonstrate if you'd like to see how we do it. We implemented this procedure a little more than a year ago and it's worked flawlessly since.

Trevor Bullock

@Brian LeBlanc I wanted to follow up with you. Thanks for your comment it helps a lot. I wanted to see what you guys do with rollover candidates that were in the wait pool for the previous entering year? Are they all lumped into the same bucket or do you have another process for those students who were on the waitlist for the previous year?

Brian LeBlanc

@Trevor Bullock Our candidates that were waitlisted in a previous year need to reapply and go through the entire admissions process again; the assessments we use (specifically in K-5) are grade level specific, so we can't use one year's assessment for placement in another grade. However, the carrot that we offer to these families is that we treat them as if they are siblings of current students, and give them early access to the application. Since we send decisions straight first come first serve, an earlier application increases the chance of an acceptance in the next school year.

It's not a guarantee, and we definitely have students who are waitlisted two years in a row, but at least they are higher up on the waitlist than they would have been in the previous year.