When
they started with RevTrak, Canyons first opened it up to Entrada Adult High School, Canyons Technical Education
Center (CTEC), and the district’s four high schools. Entrada and
CTEC were the first to take advantage of online payments. The Entrada Web
Store, which encompasses Adult High School registration as well as
Community Education registration, uses RevTrak’s
free add-on module, RegistrationWerks.
“Natalie McIff is the head secretary for Entrada, and did an outstanding job putting together
the Community Ed classes for the Web Store,” explains Sharon. “The RevTrak/RegWerks
integration has been instrumental in allowing the community to register
online for classes.”
As for CTEC, Head Secretary
Andrea Van Hazelen loves having RevTrak, and the
parents and students could not be more pleased. “They call and thank us for having it
available to them,” Andrea explains.
“Parents have loved being able to make payments over the internet
instead of coming in to the school, and the simplicity of online payments
has meant that fewer late fees are charged.
Students are also excited that they are able to log in to a computer
at school and pay their fees themselves.”
Using RevTrak has also helped CTEC with their bank reconciliation,
because the number of checks returned to the school has dropped significantly. “We have payments due at different times
during the school year, and in the past we have had a line of students
going out of the office and all the way down the hall. Now that the Web Store is in place, this
line has been greatly reduced,” says Andrea. “Having RevTrak has not only saved me
time and frustration, but it has also prevented much anxiety for parents
and students.”
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After they have filled out their
registration information, there will be an option to pay online with a
credit card. When parents select
this option, they will be redirected to the RevTrak Web Store to
make the payment. “We are mostly
looking forward to this because now everything will be done online, in
Skyward, in one database. It will
save printing and paper because we won’t have to mail out all those
registration packets; it will save the money we would have spent hiring
aides to enter and file the information; and it will ensure a higher level
of accuracy because the information will only be entered once by the parent
online, rather than multiple times by multiple people.”
According to Sharon, the proof
is in the numbers. “We are able to
collect payments that we haven’t been able to collect previously, because
people are much more willing and quick to pay with a credit card online
than go through the hassle of mailing or dropping off a check or cash. Parents are able to go online and make
payments 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
For example, over the holidays when we were off on vacation, parents
were still going online and we were processing payments. We had a huge amount of money come in
even though no one was in the office!
It’s so convenient, not only for us at the district but also for the
parents.”
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Canyons
District’s latest endeavor was registration for its summer semester
classes. For this, Canyons was
allowing both In District and Out of District students to register, so the district
had to come up with a way to separate the registration payments that were
coming in between those two categories.
Natalie Bartholomew, Administrative Assistant for Evidence Based
Learning at the district, worked closely with RevTrak throughout the Web
Store set-up process. She used the
Google Docs™ program to create separate registration forms for In District
and Out of District students, which RevTrak then incorporated into the Web
Store. Upon completion of the
appropriate form, families are redirected back to the Web Store to choose
classes and pay fees. “Registration
for summer school is way up from
last year,” Sharon reveals. “We have
already had over 380 registrations this year, whereas last year we had a
total of 240.”
In the
next couple months, Canyons will begin utilizing their RevTrak®
Web Store for online registration for one of their middle schools. “This is the first time that this will be
available for a middle school and we are so excited about it!” exclaims
Sharon. “In the past, we have always
done mail-in registration. That
required sending out hundreds of registration packets and hiring aides
solely to enter all of the data and file it correctly.” For the 2011-2012 school year, Canyons will be accepting registration for Crescent
View Middle School online, using Skyward Family Access and RevTrak. Parents will go online and register
through Skyward.
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“We initially began looking at RevTrak for fee
management,” Sharon explains. In the
past, parents were making cash or check payments, either mailing them in or
taking them in person to their school.
This meant that money was being collected at multiple locations and
by multiple people in the district.
District staff would then manually enter the payment information into
a spreadsheet and update each student’s account. “It took hours and hours,” Sharon
recalls. “We really wanted to not
only save time for those individuals who were entering all that
information, but also centralize the payment center so that all of the
money was coming into one place.”
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When she was looking for an easier method of fee
management for her 33,000-student district, Sharon Young at Canyons
received several recommendations for RevTrak. “I was a little skeptical,” says Sharon. “I was researching three companies before
we went with RevTrak. All the people
that I called just kept singing the praises of RevTrak and I thought, ‘Can
this be true?’ As it turns out, none
of them were exaggerating.”
Canyons School District in Sandy, Utah, became a
client of RevTrak in March 2010 after the district’s Help Desk Team Lead,
Sharon Young, attended a Skyward conference and
saw some of the ways that other school districts were being helped. Canyons is a very large district, serving
four cities and one township with 29 elementary schools, eight middle
schools, four high schools, two technical schools, and an adult high
school.
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District Spotlight: Canyons School
District, Sandy, UT
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Equipping you with relevant
information, collaboration, and support
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