Online Re-Enrollment Overview

Overview

Veracross Online Re-Enrollment (ORE) enables parents and/or legal guardians to complete the entire re-enrollment process online. This article provides an overview of the re-enrollment process and how we support it through ORE.

The Enrollment Process: Completing the Enrollment Checklist

The school’s re-enrollment process is entirely defined by the master Enrollment Checklist, which can be found on the Online Enrollment homepage under Core Configuration.

The enrollment checklist contains required items, which represent the steps necessary for a student to complete re-enrollment at the school. Once a student has completed all the required items on their enrollment checklist, Veracross changes their enrollment status from “Pending Re-Enrollment” to “Re-Enrolled.”

Veracross ORE interacts with the school’s enrollment checklist in two ways. First, it provides online interfaces necessary for a parent to complete the requirements of each checklist item (for the purposes of this article, these different interfaces will be referred to as “ORE components”). Second, the ORE system checks off the checklist items as the parent progresses through the re-enrollment steps online.

Overview of Enrollment Components

The ORE Landing Page is the first thing parents see when they log in to the ORE Portal. It is comprised of a combination of information elements (e.g. messages or instruction text) and enrollment components (e.g. HPU, Contract, Payment, etc.). Each of these system elements can be turned on or off and paired with school-specific instructions depending on each school’s ORE process.

There are five core components that represent the most common set of steps schools include as part of their ORE process. These core components are:

1. Household Profile Update
2. Enrollment Contracts
3. Deposit Payments
4. Enrollment Complete Banner
5. Enrollment Incomplete Banner
6. Text Elements

The remaining four are additional components that schools can turn on or off depending on what information they would like to collect from parents at this stage. The additional components are:

1. Enrollment Intentions Form
2. Withdrawal Form
3. Enrollment Policies
4. Financial Aid

Most schools will add two informational sections to the home page: a title and welcome message at the top, and business/admissions office contact information at the bottom. However, text elements can be added anywhere among the system elements.

Core Components

Household Profile Update

Many schools use the re-enrollment process as an opportunity to update key contact, medical, and emergency information for their returning students. This is accomplished through the Veracross Household Profile Update (HPU) re-enrollment form.

The HPU re-enrollment form is an online form through which parents update the key information the school stores about their family including emergency and pick-up contacts, medical information, and parent contact information. Sensitive information updates (such as address changes) can be set to require office approval before the data is actually changed in the database. To read more about setting up an HPU form for re-enrollment, click here.

The HPU form is not a required component of ORE. However, it is set up by default as a required checklist item named “Emergency Form”. This checklist item will be removed if you do not plan to incorporate this form into the ORE.

The Enrollment Contract

The Enrollment Contract is the legal document by which parents and/or legal guardians agree to all the terms and conditions necessary to re-enroll for the next school year. This document usually consists of a title, information about the re-enrolling student, summary of charges, the school’s enrollment agreement legal text, and the parent/guardians’ electronic signatures. Read more about the enrollment contract here.

The enrollment contract is the only technically required ORE component. During Veracross implementation, it was set up as a required checklist item as “Contract Complete”.

Deposit and Fee Payments
Most schools require parents to pay an upfront tuition deposit to complete re-enrollment. If schools have a Veracross-approved payment gateway, schools can include online payment as an ORE component. Online payment enables parents to pay their tuition deposits and any administrative fees online once they have completed their children’s contracts. Veracross supports both credit card and electronic check (ACH) payment online (dependent on gateway API).

Online payment is not a required component of ORE and will need to be registered as a specialized checklist item if a school intends to include it. See [Checklist & Enrollment Policies] for details.

Enrollment Complete Banner
When a parent has completed all enrollment checklist items for their child the Enrollment Complete badge will appear at the top of the ORE landing page indicating the enrollment process is complete. Schools can configure the text that appears in this banner through from the Home tab on the Online Enrollment Config/Online Re-Enrollment Config detail screens.

Enrollment Incomplete Banner
If a parent has not completed the enrollment process for one or more of their children the Enrollment Incomplete Banner will appear at the top of the ORE landing page. Each child with an incomplete enrollment is listed in the banner. This section alerts parents if they have incomplete payments even if they have already submitted the contract.

Text Elements
There are a number of text elements on the Enrollment homepage that schools can edit themselves. Each component on the Enrollment homepage can be individually edited using the text editor tool found on the Online Enrollment homepage > Online Enrollment Config/Online Re-Enrollment Config > General tab. The “Edit Home” field on the General tab of each enrollment config detail screen provides a link to the text editor tool. Clicking on the link will open the text editor in a web browser. Schools can edit the title and add instruction/description text for each component.

Additional Components

Enrollment Intentions Form
Enrollment contracts often depend on parent enrollment-related intentions for their children. Intentions includes resident status, student group information, campus, etc. The Enrollment Intentions Form enables parents to specify these contract-affecting intentions before opening their contracts. Capturing this data before a parent views their contract ensures that correct contract amounts and enrollment profiles are presented on the contract. This form often represents a parent’s first step in the online re-enrollment process.

Withdraw Form
The Withdraw Form can be added as a component to the Online Enrollment homepage. Parents may select a withdraw reason from the drop-down menu for each of their student and provide further explanation for why they are not re-enrolling. This form ensures parents will provide a reason for why they are withdrawing their child(ren) from the school.

The Withdraw Form is not a required component of ORE, but can be optionally turned on if schools would like to capture specific information about withdrawal reasons.

Enrollment-Related School Policies

Schools often incorporate non-contractual (and often non-required) elements that require parental response into their re-enrollment process. These might include agreement, permission, or volunteer sign-up renewals. Technically speaking, they are anything that can be represented as a description or a resource download linked to a single parent response. Veracross ORE enables schools to present these elements to parents during ORE by integrating Veracross’s School Policy functionality into ORE. For a full description of School Policies, and how to set them up, click here.

Enrollment Policies are not a required component of ORE. However, Veracross does enable schools to connect groups of policies to checklist items in order to make them a required step toward re-enrollment.

Financial Aid
For schools who would like to capture requests for Financial Aid during the time of Online Re-Enrollment, the Financial Aid checklist item can be activated for parents. This is a read-only checklist item that displays each of the parent’s children and their Financial Aid intention. This checklist item is marked as complete when the parent selects a “Requesting Financial Aid?” option on the Enrollment Intentions Form. Through this checklist item, schools will know exactly who is requesting Financial Aid at the time of Re-Enrollment and can act accordingly.