Continuous Enrollment

@Julie Katz We are doing continuous enrollment starting this year and are so excited. Our verbiage is different on the contract, to ensure they know the they now have to opt out before a certain date if they know they are not returning. There are two dates. If they opt out by the first deadline they avoid the re-enrollment fee. If they wait but opt out by the second date, they avoid the withdrawal fee. Any withdrawals after that are assessed a withdrawal fee.

@Candi Roberts Be aware though that you will run into issues adding new enrollments onto existing Tuition Management accounts (think current families who are enrolling siblings). This was the hiccup that forced us away from re-enrolling automatically through TM. Any new enrollments will encounter an error with an integrated contract that will prevent them from completing the contract; the contract will need to be returned manually, and you'll need to add the new enrollment to the existing account by hand.

@Barbara Glass Had you previously re-enrolled accounts in Tuition Management from one year to the next? The issue isn't with the integrated contracts per se; it's with the Tuition Management rollover. That's where our problem popped up. It ceased being a problem when we went back to requiring re-enrollment contracts on the parents' end to establish a new Tuition Management year, rather than establishing that year on our end.

@Candi Roberts As long as you know it's coming and can handle it, you're good! We had no idea it was coming and to say it was a huge headache was an understatement. ?

@Coco Parham We have to do a little bit of linguistic gymnastics to make it work. We define continuous enrollment as “you will have a seat reserved for you all the way through graduation as long as you stay current with your tuition and your student remains in good academic and behavioral standing.” That means that families have to pay the re-enrollment deposit every year to stay current, and if there is a hold on the account, we do not allow them to complete the re-enrollment confirmation until the account is brought current. If they don't complete the confirmation, their account isn't current…and if the account isn't current, they aren't in good financial standing…and if they aren't in good financial standing, their seat won't be reserved.

Similarly, if a family is asked to leave or is not invited back (or is expelled, etc.), the same thing applies. We just pull the confirmation, which means they won't submit the deposit, and the same workflow applies.

There is a deadline every year for the confirmation to be completed. After that deadline, families are taking their chances with whether they'll be able to continue. If there are seats available, great, we'll reactivate the confirmation, they pay the deposit and go on like nothing happened. If we're full, well…they had their chance, and we've filled up with new applicants, and now they're going to be waitlisted.

@Brian LeBlanc
This is a great idea!! I definitely need to bring it up to our enrollment team to think about.

@Brian LeBlanc We have this issue currently with our current families who re-enrolled with an integrated contract, and then enroll a new student (example PreK). My hope was that we could avoid this issue by moving to continuous enrollment, but it sounds like it's just a flaw in the system.