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SchoolMint: School Choice and Student Enrollment Software

6/24/2017

3 Comments

 
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SchoolMint is a platform that is designed to help preK-12 schools streamline and transform the entire student enrollment experience.  They offer services for public school districts, charter schools, independent schools, and even cities.  Additionally, SchoolMint is meant to be a resource for parents as well, and can help simplify and improve the school enrollment process for their children.  

​Overall, it’s an excellent resource for any school looking to simplify and improve their enrollment processes!

Before jumping into the review, here’s a short overview video from the SchoolMint team:


Overall, SchoolMint is meant to simplify the student enrollment process, both for school administrators and for parents.  Currently, SchoolMint serves over 1.5 million students across the US. The platform is broken down into four main components, all of which are available to SchoolMint subscribers.

1) Recruitment Management:
  • Provides tools for families to learn more about your school
  • Schools are able to get information from families

2) Application Management
  • Create enrollment applications
  • Create lotteries and school assignments
  • Manage waitlists

3) Registration Management
  • Manage new and returning student registration
  • Collect fees
  • Send and receive registration packets

4) Year-Round Communication
  • Send and receive forms and packets (surveys, field trip forms, etc.)
  • Communicate via email, SMS, and voice messaging

Across all four of these areas you’ll also receive analytics and reporting, communication options, admin workflows, digital forms with document uploads possibilities, and SIS integration.  As for pricing details, you have to contact the SchoolMint team for more information as there is variability depending on school size and enrollment complexity.

Next, let’s take a look at the admin side of SchoolMint.

SchoolMint for Administrators

As mentioned in the video, SchoolMint administrators can begin by setting up and customizing the specifics of their school enrollment process.  Administrators have complete control over what their admission applications and/or registration forms look like, and can tailor enrollment  forms to individual schools or even grade levels. 

In addition to forms, admins can also create payment forms (in case you need to collect fees or tuition) as well as custom forms (for things like field trips or permission requests).  You can learn more about how to build forms like registration packets in this video tutorial from the SchoolMint team.

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All of these forms can then be sent out to parents who are enrolled in your school/district, or who have expressed an interest in attending your school.  Once parents complete the forms, you’ll have actionable data that you can view across a variety of reports. 

As mentioned in the video, these reports can help you determine what events you held were effective in promoting enrollment, or how many students have applied to and enrolled at each grade level.  There are a wide variety of prebuilt reports, plus you can create your own custom reports to look at the data you’ve collected in ways that aren’t already included.

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One of my favorite features of the admin side is the student conversion funnel.  This view will allow you to see exactly where students are at in your enrollment process, and give you immediate insight into your workflow.

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I’m also a big fan of the Map view, which allows you to geographically see where parents are enrolling from.  This view can help admins find out if there are certain areas they aren’t reaching, and where future enrollment events might be beneficial.

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Admins can also use the application/registration index to get a better idea of individual students who have applied to and/or registered for the school.  From the application index you can view student profiles, filter based on a wide variety of criteria, and implement bulk actions like sending out mass messages, changing schools, adding notes, etc.

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Finally, for schools that do run enrollment lotteries, you can choose the “Design and Build a Lottery” option in order to set this up.  For any school who is handling these manually or through Excel, SchoolMint drastically improves this process. You can even assign different priorities and weights in your lottery, and create different lotteries for each school and grade level, as needed.  For example, if you want to give priority to students who have siblings at a particular  school, you absolutely can.

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There are an enormous variety of other features that SchoolMint offers for admins, but those are a few of the major highlights.  Additionally, you can check out SchoolMint’s “School Finder” tool to get an idea of how their services can be used across entire cities.  This example is for Oakland, and you can see how much easier a tool like this can make the enrollment process.

For admins looking for more information, you can check out SchoolMint’s YouTube channel, or send their team a message to schedule a demo.

SchoolMint for Parents

Just like the admin side, on the parent side, SchoolMint is incredibly easy to use.  Parents can use the iOS or Android app to see what schools are around them, and can send in application materials straight from the app.  They can even upload images of documents and sign forms from within the app as well.

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Everything that admins create within SchoolMint is also mobile friendly, so even if parents don’t have the app, they can click on a link a district sends out and be taken to an online version of any forms that are needed by the school or district.  Plus, parents can choose their messaging preferences and decide if they want SMS, voice, or email updates about their children and the application process. They can also choose their preferred language, with Spanish and English provided by default, and other translations available upon request from a school or district.

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In short, the parent side of SchoolMint is incredibly user friendly and allows parents to quickly and easily find and apply to local schools.

Overall...

If you represent a school or district that is tired of having to manually manage enrollment processes, or if you’re just looking for a better enrollment solution, SchoolMint is absolutely worth considering.  The interface is incredibly intuitive and user-friendly, while still allowing admins complete control over the type of data that is collected.  The reports offer immediate insight into data that has been collected, and the integration with your school’s SIS make things even simpler.  If you’re interested in finding out more, you can contact the SchoolMint team for a demo.
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​The opinions expressed in this review are my own.

I was not compensated for writing this review.

3 Comments
Michael Wangai link
7/1/2017 01:56:58 am

This Online Enrollment platform is good innovation for schools and parents. I want to know more about it. I will continue reading your articles to broaden my understanding of Education innovations for schools

Reply
Mike
7/3/2017 07:45:54 am

Thanks Michael! And thanks for reading!

Mike

Reply
Shannon Thompson link
7/13/2017 11:26:01 pm

The shared article is really helpful to my students. We thankful to you for giving such information improves the performance of the students in the exam.

Reply



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