Rogers School District taking registration online

Audrey King, fourth-grade teacher at Tucker Elementary School, helps Michael Girenko, 9, with his assignment Tuesday at the Rogers district school in Lowell.
Audrey King, fourth-grade teacher at Tucker Elementary School, helps Michael Girenko, 9, with his assignment Tuesday at the Rogers district school in Lowell.

ROGERS -- The School District is adopting an electronic student registration system officials say will save parents and school employees significant time when it comes to filling out and managing enrollment paperwork.

Charles Lee, assistant superintendent for general administration, explained the system at Tuesday's School Board meeting. The board voted unanimously to accept a contract with SRC Solutions, a Pennsylvania-based firm, to implement the system.

Next meeting

The Rogers School Board’s next meeting is scheduled for 5 p.m. Dec. 19 at the School District’s Administration Building, 500 W. Walnut St.

Source: Staff report

The contract for $116,050 is good through June 2020. That includes the license fee for the system and staff training.

A district committee examined the firm's Registration Gateway product and determined it would provide a more convenient way to enroll students, Lee said.

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He said he talked to some other school districts in Arkansas, including Fort Smith, using the system. They are all happy with it, Lee said.

Parents will be able to register their children online any time of day. They may also upload any documents schools need, such as vaccination records and verification of address forms. Schools, in turn, may either approve the registration or request additional information from parents.

School registrars will be saved from organizing mounds of paperwork. That will reduce costs on both paper and labor, according to district officials.

The system, using information previously provided, will automatically fill in students' basic information on forms parents must fill out, thus eliminating a lot of manual data entry, Lee said.

Kristen Cobbs, board president, asked about the security of the system. Lee expressed confidence in it, saying the district's Technology Department had been involved in the committee that studied it.

Cobbs thanked administrators for the work they put into vetting the system.

"It sounds very exciting," she said.

In other business, Superintendent Marlin Berry said he's working on arranging a groundbreaking for the district's 16th elementary school, to be held some time within the next few weeks.

The yet-to-be-named school will be built on the southern portion of 80 acres the district owns at West Garrett and South Bellview roads in the fast-growing southwest part of the district. It's scheduled to open in August 2019.

During a meeting Oct. 30, the board approved a guaranteed maximum price of $1.7 million on site work for the school, about $234,000 less than projected in the project's preliminary budget.

At next month's meeting, the board will consider a maximum price on construction and improvement of the road in front of the school, which is Garrett Road. Rogers will reimburse the district for half of that cost.

Berry also reported to the board district administrators are working to come up with a school year calendar not only for 2018-19, but for 2019-20 as well.

"The basics of the calendar don't change an awful lot from year to year," he said. "That helps our families and teachers and everybody who wants to know when breaks are going to be."

Rogers, like most school districts, typically doesn't establish a school year calendar more than one year in advance.

By state statute, the earliest Arkansas school districts can start next school year is Aug. 20. That presents problems for those districts that like to get the first semester done by Christmas, so Rogers is one of many districts applying for a waiver to the rule on the start of school, Berry said.

NW News on 11/15/2017

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