Prepare: Roll over your Waitlist in SchoolMint

What is covered in this article?

• Does SchoolMint support a waitlist rollover?
• Questions to Consider
• How Prior Year Applications Interact with Current Year Applications

Is it possible to roll over my waitlist to next year?

• SchoolMint currently does not support automatic rollover functionality.
  • To convert this year's waitlisted students to new applications for next year, you can bulk send an email/text message to all students on the waitlist from this year asking them to log in to SchoolMint and re-apply for the next year. Once they are in their account, it only takes a few clicks to re-apply for the next year. If the application form is the same, they will not need to type in any new information.
• However, rolling over an existing waitlist within SchoolMint from one enrollment year to another may be part of your organization's/school's/district's needs each year.
  • If you absolutely must automate the rollover, please contact your SchoolMint representative at [e-mail] to request a quote from our services team.

Questions to Consider: 

• How were your students offered seats in the current school year?
  • Did you make offers by running a lottery? Did you use priorities? Did you only look at the submission date? Etc.
• Would you like students from the current enrollment year to retain their waitlist numbers?
  • If yes, this would mean that students from the 2020-2021 school year with waitlist numbers 1-5 would be placed ahead of students in the 2021-2022 school year that were originally waitlisted 1-3.
  • Ex. John (WL1), Maria (WL2), and Max (WL3) in the 2021-2022 school year would now become John (WL6), Maria (WL7), and Max (WL8), because students from tthe 2020-2021 school year now have WL #'s 1-5 for the 2021-2022 school year, thereby moving John, Maria, and Max down.
• Will students all be sorted by the priorities they have?
  • After rolling the 2020-2021 school year waitlist to the 2021-2022 school year, will all the applications then be recalculated by the priorities each student has on their application?
• Would you like to add a priority to all rolled over waitlisted students so that you can differentiate between who was rolled over and who applied to that enrollment year?
  
  • In this case, a student in the 2020-2021 school year that gets rolled over to the 2021-2022 school year would receive a priority called something like `Org Waitlist Rollover` so that in the application index, you can filter for students who were rolled over, and you could use these priorities in your lottery design.
• IF you would like to add a priority to all rolled over waitlisted students, would you like to give a slight preference to those students in the lottery design?
  
  • Ex. You could have a lottery design in the 2020-2021 school year with Sibling Attending as the first sub-lottery, Employee Child as the second, FRL as the third, and In District as the fourth.
  • For the 2021-2022 school year lottery, it could sub-lottery #1 = Sibling Attending and WL Rollover, 2nd sub-lottery = Sibling Attending, 3rd sub-lottery = Employee Child and WL Rollover, 4th sub-lottery = Employee Child, etc.
• IF you would like to add a priority to all rolled over waitlisted students, would you like to give a full preference to those students in the lottery design?
  
  • Ex. You could have a lottery design in the 2020-2021 school year with Sibling Attending as the first sub-lottery, Employee Child as the second, FRL as the third, and In District as the fourth.
  • For the 2021-2022 school year lottery it could sub-lottery #1 = Sibling Attending and WL Rollover, 2nd sub-lottery = Employee Child and WL Rollover, 3rd sub-lottery = FRL and WL Rollover, 4th sub-lottery = In District and WL Rollover, 5th sub-lottery = Sibling Attending, 6th = Employee Child, etc.
• Would you like students to run in the lottery each year and therefore go into Submitted status when they complete an application?
  
  • IF yes, then students will be re-organized on the waitlist with their priorities (and the global lottery number that is assigned when the lottery is run)
  • This would also require that all waitlisted students are moved to Submitted status and are changed to open-enrollment applications so that they can be run in the lottery even though they are a rolled over waitlist applicant.
• Would you like students to remain in waitlisted status and never run a lottery?
  
  • IF yes, then you would simply budget seats for your students and make offers through the Admissions > Make Offers page.
  • This would mean that your students would not have their waitlist number changed.
• Would you like to roll over student notes?
  
  • Ex. Maria has note in the 2020-2021 school year that says 'Contact Guardian re. Birth Certificate`.
  • Would you like this note to rollover to the 2021-2022 school year?
• Would you like to roll over all priorities for a student?
  
  • Ex. John has priorities Sibling Attending and In District in the 2020-2021 school year.
  • Should he have those same priorities in the 2021-2022 school year?
• Would we expect the WL numbers from the 2020-2021 school year to the 2021-2022 school year to match after the rollover?
  
  • Yes, we would expect the WL numbers from the 2020-2021 school year to the 2021-2022 school year to roughly match after the rollover.
  • However, if there are new applications submitted to the 2021-2022 school year before the rollover is executed, we'd expect the order to change.
  • To verify the rollover, you'd want to make sure the relative order is maintained

How Prior Year Applications Interact with Current Year Applications:

• If your school/district does purchase the option to roll over the previous enrollment year's current waitlist to the new enrollment year, a couple items/questions may arise as you complete that task and prepare to open up for the new enrollment year's application. 
• Assigning Next Grade Level: SchoolMint will import a current waitlisted application for the next school year by increasing their "applying to" grade level.
  • For example, if a student has a 2020-2021 school year waitlist application for grade 2, that student (applicant) would roll over as a 2021-2022 school year grade 3 application.
• Resulting Application Status: when rolling over waitlisted applications to a new enrollment year, one needs to direct SchoolMint the original status for the new applications.
  • Should the waitlisted applications start in the new enrollment year's application pool in Submitted to then be considered in the next grade-level lottery?
    • Since all applications coming into the new school year will all be in Submitted status, we can assign a lottery priority to all rolled over applications if that would help with tracking purposes.
  • Should the waitlisted applications remain in the new enrollment year's application pool in Waitlisted status, not run through the new year's grade-level lottery?

• Waitlist Placement: adding rolled over applications to a new enrollment year's in Waitlisted status presents the scenario of which enrollment year's applications to honor higher in the waitlist.
  • Should the waitlisted applications from the previous year remain in their current placement, but for the new year grade level? For example, the grade 2 waitlisted application WL-9 would become a grade 3 WL-9 application.
  • Since these rolled over applications are in status Waitlisted and will not be run in the new year's grade-level lottery, SchoolMint can configure the school/grade's lottery design to have new waitlisted applications be placed before or after the previous year's applications.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Still have questions? Email us at [e-mail].