Annual Procedures for Admissions

@Bryan Lorenzo We do them at two different times; admissions for the upcoming school year opens around Labor Day every year (this year we're opening on September 5 for 2024-25 enrollments) and we are actually running concurrent admissions for both the current and upcoming year until around Thanksgiving. We'll still enroll for the current year until then, and will notify parents if they're applying for a grade in the upcoming year where we would have an enrollment seat to consider them for in the current year.

I have a punch list for what needs to be done to open a new admissions year and I'm happy to share. When it comes time to close current year admissions, I don't have a checklist but it's pretty straightforward: run a candidates list of who is still active, send an official note informing them that current year admissions are now closed, and mass deactivate.

@Barbara Glass Correct; we require new applications for each admissions year, including for students on the waitlist. The reasoning behind this is that the assessments we use are grade level specific, so if we have a student who is waitlisted for 2nd grade and took a 2nd grade assessment, we can't really use that for placement in 3rd grade the next year, and we need to make sure the student has made sufficient progress to be successful in a subsequent year.

The olive branch we offer to waitlisted families is early access to the application; since we consider applications in the order received, waitlisted families (and siblings of current students) are allowed to apply before the general public, so that their priority date is earlier and their chances of being offered enrollment increase.

@Bryan Lorenzo You might also check out

It includes tasks for platform managers too.

@Brian LeBlanc, This may sound extreme, but we have been avoiding deactivating candidates who do not matriculate. As I recall, we ran into problems finding the pre-existing record if a deactivated applicant [for one year] applied for a subsequent year.

Is this not a problem? Does it create new records that must be merged?

Curious.

@john ronan I'd say it's less of a problem than it used to be. EMS is pretty good, although not failproof, at finding existing records when processing inquiries or applications, and if you merge them simultaneously to processing paperwork, it's pretty seamless.

You have to use a bit of spidey sense though; if, for example, an applicant comes up with a potential duplicate record, but the parents do not show a duplicate, why is that? Could it be a nickname thing (Chris vs. Christopher) or something along those lines?

I always try to merge them up front wherever possible, because it causes fewer problems than it does down the line, when you start running into academic records, Smart Family IDs, etc. in two places and it really can cause a mess. For that reason, I'll go into Core and edit a record so that it matches and will force EMS to notice a duplicate (or use the new “edit information” box in the processing screen, if that's easier). It's never a guarantee, but I catch probably 97-98% of duplicates doing it this way.

The only ongoing problem we run into is that if an application or inquiry comes through for a Past Candidate who applied in a previous year, EMS will make that candidate active again, but it will not enable the parent's login. You'll have to go into Core and enable it manually. It takes all of about five seconds, so it's an annoyance but nothing worse.

We have our lockout message manually edited to be obvious to parents in this situation: "We apologize for the inconvenience, but your account has been disabled. This is likely caused by one of the following issues: * You had applied for a previous academic year, but did not complete the admissions process to enroll." (or a security lockout, etc.)

We normally have more than 1000 applicants active at any given time, so we do need to deactivate fairly regularly so that we have accurate information on the number of applicants who are actively interested vs. who filled out an inquiry months ago and is not progressing through the process.