The school year has kicked off, and now it’s the busy season! Teachers and staff are juggling multiple tasks to ensure student success, and schools are focused on ensuring new families feel welcome. Whatever your role, your school’s Student Information System (SIS) holds the key to making the school year run as smoothly as possible.
A strong SIS ensures student and family information data are synced, strengthens communication between school and community, and reduces manual tasks for admin staff.
Here are some key questions private and independent K-12 schools can ask when considering an SIS solution.
- How are you ensuring your school’s admissions data is clean, rolled over and ready to transfer for everyday use?
- Can you pull student demographic data easily so you can plan for long-term diversity efforts and campaigns to new families?
- Does your SIS solution streamline reporting efforts and reduce manual reporting tasks?
- Does your current system offer ease of tuition payments, including online payment capabilities and automatic receipt replies for families?
- Do you have your communications strategy set for quick and easy, plug-and-send messaging to families?
- Does your system enable customized brand communication for your school?
Benefits of Combining an SIS with Your Other School Software
You’ve built out a student roster through a combination of recruiting and retaining families, now what?
Student information is vital for many purposes, and schools can benefit from solutions that seamlessly integrate data from your admissions, enrollment, and tuition management solution to your SIS.
Data maintained in one centralized location ensures easy deployment to tuition management systems, reporting tools, communication platforms, online gradebooks, and any additional integrations your school relies on. With this comprehensive data deployment, operations happen quickly and effectively, giving families the best possible experience and giving administrators the insights to make improvements. These improvements could include the following benefits.
Updated Tuition Policies
The Education Data Initiative reports private school tuition averages $12,800 annually, with private boarding schools eclipsing $60,000. To better promote diversity and student success, schools can meet families where their current financial situation exists with an array of payment flexibility options.
Below are some valuable strategies your school can consider when managing family tuition and school fees.
- Provide resources for families as they apply for federal and state financial aid programs and adopt a tuition management system that easily integrates with your financial aid platform.
- Offering flexible payment options, such as:
- Payment in installments, where families pay a certain amount of tuition across different time periods, to allow for financial recovery.
- Discounts for siblings, early payment discounts, and shifting to a continuous enrollment season – all can improve school revenue.
- Providing secure, 24/7 mobile-friendly access for tuition and school fee payments. More secure than paper checks, online transactions give families peace of mind with quick, convenient payment.
Set your school up for long-term success with flexible tuition policies that encourage families to re-enroll year after year.
Offering Teachers and Families Strong Communication Tools
Once students have officially enrolled, move them from the tuition management system to the SIS for day-to-day use. Their entire student profile lives here, with grades, feedback, and report cards stored and available for parent review.
By integrating a gradebook with your SIS, students can easily upload assignments for review without the need for printing. Teachers can easily make in-line edits and comments, giving students feedback quickly and easily. Especially powerful in the automated intelligence era, teachers also have the power to check digital submissions against a plagiarism checker of their choosing.
Increased Family Transparency
Using a robust SIS platform that integrates with a tuition management system, can help schools keep families in the know with timely communications across the school year. Here are a few ways schools can use the benefits of integration:
- The week of different admissions deadlines, send a reminder email to families who haven’t fully completed the full admissions process. If your tuition management system fully integrates into your SIS, you can easily pull this data to quickly create a send list.
- Alert parents to upcoming events and add prospective families to the invite list so they feel part of the community before even enrolling.
- Automate notices and updates so they only need to be written and scheduled once.
Above all, your SIS should have an easy-to-use interface so administrators can easily send any needed communications to the right audiences.
Combine Your School’s Administration and SIS with TADS + Educate
While admissions, enrollment, and tuition management are often separate from the day-to-day functions of student information, combining both gives your school greater efficiency for the new academic year. Use those extra resources to improve student and family experiences.