What’s the status of on-line registration?

Our school board recently approved the contract for on-line registration with Infinite Campus.  Programmers will need at least 4 months to complete the necessary work – which means that on-line registration will not be available until mid to late May 2013.

Q1, How does this impact registration at the elementary schools that typically do mail in registration starting in Feb/March?
A1. Elementary schools will be asked to proceed with their existing paper based registration that are typically mailed home to parents.  When parents return their demographic sheets, if there are changes/updates that need to be made, schools will send them to the District Registrar for processing.

Q2.  How does this impact secondary schools that typically wait until August for registration?
A2. We anticipate using the new on-line registration this summer to assist with secondary school enrollments – however, it will not fully replace on-site registration, as parents/students will still need to attend on site registration in August.

Q3.  When it’s implemented – exactly how does it work?
A3.  It starts by emailing the parents and inviting them to visit a website where they can confirm if they are planning to return to school in the fall or not.  They also have the ability to see their existing information, as well the ability to edit/modify this information.  This is information is then routed to the District Registrar, who approves updated information as well as provides a list to the schools for who is returning, who is not, and who hasn’t responded.

Q4. When it’s implemented, parents will no longer have to visit the school during August, correct?
A4.  Incorrect.  On-site registration will still need to take place, as that’s where student have their photo taken for their ID badge, pick up their schedules, and other tasks.  Our desire is to move part of the registration on-line too streamline the process as much as possible, but not to remove the on-site component.

Q5. Will parents be able to pay for school fees on-line?
A5.  Yes, this component is already available within RevTrak and will be available to parents as a part of the online registration.

Changes to Infinite Campus Messenger

Our parents may have noticed that our district’s email notifications are no longer coming from messenger@wdmcs.org  and are now coming from a different address (delivery@critsend.com on behalf of no-reply@wdmcs.net)

Why the changes?      |        What is it doing for us?

When we were sending notices out through messenger@wdmcs.org, we were finding a large number messages were being held as spam or not delivered at all.   It turns out that providers like yahoo.com aren’t big fans of having our daily emails and our high-bulk messages coming from the same source, so we’ve had to split up our emails.  In addition, we are now sending out Infinite Campus messages through a 3rd party email server, critsend.com.  In the end, this helps ensure delivery of our email notifications as critsend helps handle any requirements that the providers request.

Advantages:

* 99.4% delivery rate.  We’re now seeing the highest delivery rate that we’ve ever had.

* We now receive automated notifications when emails are either blocked by providers, identified as spam, or even reported as spam.  It’s helpful for us to be automatically notified when these situations occur so we can contact providers to begin working on clearing them up.

Disadvantages: 

* The delivery is slower.   Sending mail through critsend.com takes longer than sending out through our own server.  For example, our high school’s daily announcements would normally take 15 to 20 minutes to send to 2,600 users.  Sending through critsend.com appears to take closer to an hour.  However, in the end, if it takes an hour to make sure that folks actually receive the message – that seems to be worthwhile.

Here’s an overview of the messages that our district has sent out through Infinite Campus Messenger in the last week….

Date	# emails sent	Filtered	Bounced	Blocked by ISP	Total Blocked	Delivery rate
5-Dec	7078	0	21	6	27	99.62%
6-Dec	10543	0	54	13	67	99.36%
7-Dec	8919	0	29	5	34	99.62%
8-Dec	174	0	0	0	0	100.00%
9-Dec	0	0	0	0	0
10-Dec	13121	7	41	21	69	99.47%
11-Dec	7482	6	17	17	40	99.47%
12-Dec	13,001	11	31	23	65	99.50%
13-Dec	9838	16	20	8	44	99.55%
14-Dec	13,272	23	35	14	72	99.46%
15-Dec	121	1	0	0	1	99.17%
16-Dec	932	5	2	1	8	99.14%
17-Dec	20,138	47	42	21	110	99.45%
	104,619	116	292	129	537	99.49%