Rolling enrollment

@Candi Roberts:

Our head of school wants to move to a rolling enrollment model where families are assumed to be re-enrolling and don't have to re-enroll. They would have to notify us if they don't intend to return. Does anyone have experience with this and if so, how does it work for you and how does it work in Blackbaud?

We have experience with this, and our experience is that it is an absolute nightmare if you are integrated with Tuition Management. It's not an issue from the EMS/Core side of things, but because a new Tuition Management account is created for every enrollment year, any new enrollment in an existing family (think a kindergarten student joining an older sibling) needs to be manually added to the family's existing TM account and they cannot complete the integrated contract in EMS.

We tried it for one year and it was such a headache that we backtracked. We now present “re-enrollment” as a confirmation of intent to remain enrolled, and the “contract” is remarkably short - basically “yep, we're coming back, here's our deposit and here's my signature”. It's essentially a waypoint to establish a new Tuition Management account for the upcoming year, nothing more.

Happy to share some more if you'd like, but the bottom line is that if you have integrated contracts, stay far, far, far away from continuous re-enrollment.