The keys to a successful and positive experience with K-12 Online are advance planning and proper setup.
The following steps are designed to guide you through setting up your site and ensuring its readiness for your students and parents.
Implementation
1. SETUP YOUR SCHOOL/ORGANIZATION WITH A BANK ACCOUNT (SAVINGS & CHECKING)
If you plan to use the system to process payments for financial obligations, donations, fees, and purchases; then you will need someplace for the money to go that is safe and accessible to the K12OL partners for deposits. Contact your district regarding any rules they may have for these accounts and/or suggested banks they recommend, then contact the bank and establish both a savings and checking account.
2. SET YOUR ORGANIZATION UP AS A CREDIT CARD / ELECTRONIC CHECK MERCHANT
If you plan to accept credit cards If your school or organization would like credit card services via the internet, Jireh Infosystems (JIS) will help set you up as a Merchant Processor with an integrated Payment gateway. The Merchant Processor allows you to accept credit cards, and the payment gateway allows you to accept credit cards over the internet. A payment gateway is needed because it authenticates credit card transactions over the internet, requiring a higher level of internet security than current servers are able to handle. In order to reduce the number of statements received and streamline the application process, JIS has contracted with TransFirst that will do both. We will provide you with an online application in order to establish an account. Credit card fees will be handled directly with TransFirst.
3. DISTRICT SETTINGS
You will need to configure your district settings, and these settings will be applied to ALL of your schools. District settings allows you to show/hide some system forms as well as show/hide some system form fields. See DISTRICT SETTINGS.
4. SETUP GRADE LEVELS
If this has not been done for you, you need to define for the K-12 system which grade levels are served by your school. This will permit you to later establish forms and fees that are specific to those grade levels. See GRADE LEVEL MANAGER.
5. MANGE FINANCIAL YEARS
The entry/exit date or academic sessions in K-12 Online must match exactly with your SIS. This will allow you to push/pull the correct students pertaining to that school year. See SETTING UP SCHOOL YEAR DATES.
6. SCHOOL PORTAL MENUS
You have the ability to change the text on the parent portal menu buttons as well as show/hide any of them. See SCHOOL PORTAL MENUS.
7. SCHOOL THEME
You can customize the look of your parent portal to match that of your current website. See SCHOOL THEME.
8. PAGE CONTENT
You can change the text and add headers to most pages under Page Content. The system uses a CMS editor which allows you to customize the content of all the pages that parents see. This is highly recommended so that you can maintain each school's autonomy and provide parents with instructions on how to use the registration system. See PAGE CONTENT.
9. STUDENT LETTERS / MAIL TEMPLATE
You can customize letters to send to prospective students and/or current students. Some admins like to use this feature to let parents know when the registration window opens and to welcome them to use the K-12 Online site. See MAIL TEMPLATE
10. SET UP YOUR WEBSTORE
A merchant account can be divided into storefronts. Storefronts help organize the different groups of items. However, there is no harm in having a laundry list of items all on one page. Some storefronts may be “spiritwear” or “books”. It’s entirely up to you to decide how you would like the user’s shopping experience to be. See WEBSTORE INTRO.
10. SET UP TUITION
There are many settings such as Base Tuition, Payment Schedules, Discounts and more that can be set up for your schools tuition. Most of this is set up at district level in the DCP.
11. TESTING YOUR SITE
It is important to test your site out before going live to the parent community. A group of volunteers are likely candidates for this task.
12. OPENING UP THE TUITION SITE TO YOUR PARENTS
If your school would like to go completely paperless, you can send your “welcome-back” letter through an e-mail mail merge. However, for most districts, sending a one-page welcome letter is a good indicator for residency verification. We suggest that your parents activate the K-12 Online link through your school’s website and not directly by typing in the URL. In that way, you can control the start of registration just by making the link on your site available or not and avoid any URL typo errors.