The system was developed by Region 4 Education Service Center. Region 4 was awarded the project after careful study of the needs and concerns through input from campus personnel including administrators, bookkeepers, and Technology Services staff. The system is based on on Region 4’s escWorks product.
The key components of the system include: online payment module for families to pay student fees, obligations, and optional expenses such as yearbook and parking; full financial accounting and reporting application with interface to StudentPlus and access for all teachers to record and credit obligations.
The system was opened up for FJH families on August 10 and for FHS families on August 14.
This new system replaces a program that was previously used that did not offer online fees payment. Also the old system lacked the scalability to use it in the expanded network environment. In addition, it lacked an obligations tracking component, which was handled by another locally developed application. The new system provides all of these features in a unified, web-based application.
The two main goals of the new system were to allow families to make payments online, thus reducing the lines for fee payments on site, and provide an accounting and reporting system that meets the unique needs of collecting and managing district fees.
“The system is a huge success! Lines for onsite payment were nearly non-existent, especially at the high school. Approximately 43 percent of high school fees were paid online, offsite by families. In addition, the system performed very well for those paying and collecting fees on site. The system also made it very easy for the bookkeepers to reconcile and balance the accounts in very little time,” Executive Director of Technology David Jacobson said.
With such a complex program and fee structure, there were bound to be a few challenges. Due to extensive planning and testing, these challenges were kept to a minimum.
The greatest challenges were:
1. Families were mailed a letter explaining the new system and included a unique username and password. Some families reported that they lost the letter or never received it. For the security of information in the system, that information could not be provided by phone or email. Anyone without their login information needed to pay onsite. This information can still be provided to parents, guardians, and students by the campus bookkeeper.
2. There were a few problems related to some specific fees not being applied properly to the correct group of students. Also, some fees were incorrectly included in the family maximum limit. District staff worked very closely with Region 4 programmers to correct these problems very early in the registration process.
But, despite these minor setbacks, FISD and Region 4 staffs are extremely pleased with the new system. A brand new system was effectively implemented without the major problems that often haunt rollouts of large-scale applications. |
