A new teacher reflects on a surprising first year By Alicia Simba I started my first day as a teacher last August, staring at seven little 4-year-olds who stared back at me through a quiet Zoom screen. I pressed unmute, animatedly introduced myself, and invited them to do the same, as they sunk into their parent’s
Education in the United States of America is provided in public, private, and home schools. State governments set overall educational standards, often mandate standardized tests for K–12 public school systems and supervise, usually through a board of regents, state colleges, and universities. The bulk of the $1.3 trillion in funding comes from state and local governments, with federal funding accounting for only about $200 billion. Private schools are generally free to determine their own
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VNN’s Romy Glazer counts down the top plays in high school sports from athletic departments across the country.
Watch as Romy Glazer from VNN reviews some of the highlights from VNN Network schools this week. Plays come from high schools such as Maple Mountain (UT), Walnut (CA), Southport (IN), Hempfield Area (PA), Randolph (AL), and Lincoln Way West (IL).
VNN’s Katelyn Kasella sat down with Scott Rosenberg, rSchoolToday’s VP of Sales, to get a demo of their top four products for high school athletics. Here is an inside look at the second product, Activity Registration.
Scott Rosenberg: Okay we’re going to take a quick look at this point at our activity registration for online registration. And so our online, or activity registration program integrates in real time with our activity scheduler that I was just able to show you. This allows for touchless registration, which is so important. It’s always been important, but obviously during COVID it’s even more important. It lets people send in any kind of medical forms and all this information that’s submitted goes to our central database. It also goes to our app. So things like emergency contact information, preferred hospital, doctors, allergies, things like that all go right onto an app that coaches have access to, that athletic trainers have access to, that athletic directors have access to.
So here’s just a great example. When I’m on the sideline and if the kid was to get injured, my athletic trainer might be attending to that athlete, but if we needed for any reason to take a quick look at the preferred hospital, if we had to take a quick look at bad allergies, if we need to get in touch with mom or dad, I literally go right onto my app, I can text the parents, I can call the parents, I can email the parents, right from the app. Or again, I can see that emergency contact or their preferred doctors, things like that. All right there, I never have to do anything else. Emergency cards are another option as well, so instead of those hard copy emergency cards that so many schools place in medkits, all that information is filled out through this program.
Instead of sending those emergency cards home to be signed, filled out, we actually gather all that data through this program, and then we just print them out ourselves. We print them out on card stock, and then we throw them into medkits just to have them. Again, all the info is there on the app, but it’s just a great efficient way for our coaches and trainers to have all the information. Let me take you through the public slide.
This is my activity registration site, and what you’ll notice is that we utilize it for more than just high school athletics. We use it for our clubs and activities, we use it for parking, and we use it for middle school sports. This can be used for literally anything. As I take you through, we actually do our SAT registration through it, we do field trips at times through it, we can do anything. And we can also collect payments through this site, that’s been amazing for us. We have a pay-to-play situation in my school district, and I used to literally have to unfortunately track kids down. They would register for sports but then I needed them to pay, so I’d have to like grab kids during the school day, and say can you please have mom or dad send them a check. The compliance on that was difficult. We’ve missed kids, we didn’t get all the payments, so now we do it right through the system and we require payment at the end of the registration process.
Let me take you through a quick look at the public side of registration for my school. In New Jersey unfortunately we have to collect hard copy paperwork for medical. This year we’ve waived that because of COVID, and so we had everybody submit all their medial paperwork online. Most states can just literally have a registration piece up here and say click here to register. What we also do is tie in my school district, we tie their registrations to their student IDs. This really makes sure that the same student, it’s apples to apples. So a kid named David in our system who mom calls Davey, and who they call themselves Dave, is all that same person in our system.
And it prevent duplicates. So we bring in our students from our student management system, we grab their student IDs, and then that allows when new users come on, it allows them to basically create a family account, and to just say hey here’s my last name, here’s my student ID, and make sure that it runs a check through our system that we’re dealing with that same person. And it makes it really smooth moving forward.
So let me take you through somebody who has registered already and what that registration process would look like. And again, what’s nice is that they have family accounts. So what you’ll notice is it saves the demographic information moving forward, so if you have three kids in a school district, and they each play two sports, oftentimes, especially with hard copy paperwork, you have to fill out most of that same demographic information like six different times for the year. In this case it saves it. So here’s a specific family account. If there were multiple kids, you would be able to see multiple different names here. I’ve called this Cave Dummy One.
Also what you’ll see is a nice simple way to understand their status. If they have a clearance to start practicing, that’s always a pain point for ads. Hey, how do we get that information out to our community to say a kid can walk onto the field onto the court and practice day one. We send that out through the system, and I’ll show you that, but it also allows parents to come on and see the status themselves, so gone are the days of parents saying I didn’t know, I did n’t even receive the email from the athletic department. We’ve trained our community to log in and see their own status of clearance.
Let me give you an example of going ahead and completing a registration if there were multiple kids or if you needed to register a new student. However, I’m going to just register this one child named dummy. Here are the active forms that we have available. So you can see our spring high school registration, or middle school, high school sports registration. Our parking form for the year, and here you can see AP testing and Capstone testing. We’re going to take a quick look at the spring athletic packet for high school.
Again, the beauty is that we’ve saved all the demographic information for this specific kid and their family. The only thing we didn’t save was their year. I’ll commit, I’ll plug into this as a 10th grader, you have the ability to edit this, but clearly most of the time there’s not much to edit except maybe a cell phone number. I’ll move onto the next page here. You’re going to see what sports we offer. In this COVID year, we actually changed seasons, so I had to offer winter and spring sort of at the same time for registration. But let me give you a look. Let’s say kid registering for boys lacrosse here at my school.
We also have the ability to say we partnered with a company that allows them to send information for kids if they’re interested in playing, let’s say a sport in college. You can see here that they’re going to be emailed information by the NSCA if they choose a specific sport. Let’s say they wanted to know about men’s soccer in college. It allows them the opportunity to go ahead and grab some more information, sent to them through the system.
Next is the parent/guardian information. I should also point out that anything starred is a required field, so the beauty of this is that nobody can move forward. You’re never wondering if, hey did somebody miss anything on paperwork, if they didn’t have any of the specific required information in here, it won’t let them submit it. You keep this in the digital filing cabinet, so you always have access to it, and you never have to sort of look at the information to make sure it’s been submitted. In this case I’m requiring a parent regarding information from the first parent, but you’ll see no stars here on parent/guardian information for the second one, since not every child obviously has two.
Again, it saves that demographic info which is wonderful. Here is where you can upload physical information, or any other information, should you choose to allow that to happen. In this case I’m going to skip that process, but it gives you again, the ability to have people upload physical dates and information. Here is where we collect that really important medial info that we have access to, again, on the app at all times. So primary doctor, hospital, dentist, medical conditions, medical insurance information, dental insurance, medications, here’s that emergency contact information if parents are not available, here’s the relationship to the child, here’s information about emergency authorization, so if they needed to be in an ambulance, we would have that medial authorization to take care of the kids right there on file. And then here’s some emerging transportation, again, treatment policy that they can basically sign off again, all this information, we can put it in, customize any of this information for you and you’ll see on this next screen some very customized information for both my school and for the state of New Jersey.
So here is some more medical. Again, this is very customized health history information that we collect here in New Jersey. You know just really since your last physical, have you had any of these medial this occur. Here is our COVID sign off for coronavirus, we have random drug testing at my school, again very customized. But you can see the ability to put anything in for your specific school. Here is my athletic department questions and concerns process. You know, if you have a problem with the coach we encourage the student athlete to talk to the coach before mom or dad go to their neighbor who’s a board of education member. I can’t tell you that they always abide by it, but we have it here. Concussion policy, and what you’ll notice at the bottom of these policies is the ability to have signups.
Schools like to have all these on separate pages, so what you would see here at the bottom is the ability to check off to say hey, I’ve signed, I agree, I’ve signed off on this concussion policy and the ability to come on and put the student athlete signature and the parent signature. Again, you can then break and hit next and go to a separate page if you want. I’ve just chosen to include it all on the same page.
Here is my student athlete handbook, like all the rules of our department. You can download it, it’s 50 pages, so this would be hey download it, read it, and then check off that you agree to those rules. So again, as you go through our steroid testing or banned drugs, you can see the ability to have either check offs or sign offs if the state requires that you sign off on it. We have an opioid policy or information policy here in New Jersey. We also have a video so parents have to view the policy and also watch a YouTube video.
You can see here where they check off, and then at the bottom, I’ve given one more online signature process to say I agree to all these rules and so forth and so on, and then the next page would take you here in my place to the ability to pay for that sport. The last thing I’ll say about that is that we can basically put any parameters in place that you have at your school for payments. Here’s an example. At my school we pay $150 per athlete, and that’s the maximum that they can be charged per athlete. We also have a $400 family maximum, so if they have four kids and it was $150 per child, that $600 number would revert to $400 and wouldn’t charge them any more than that. And we charge 150 per sport, but that 150 max. So if the kid registered for girls soccer in the fall, they paid their $150, then they went on to register for girls basketball, and normally they’d be charged $150, the system would recognize that they paid the $150 already and not charge them for that next sport.
That applies to our activities as well, so if it was one fee that applied to activities as well, they wouldn’t charge them if they registered for let’s say the chess club as well as a sport.
Okay I’m going to quickly jump in from the administrator role and show you what you can do, how you can leverage all this data that’s collected, and so when I log in what you’ll see is that I will have access to every family account. I can search every family account here, I can look up data from each family account or I can run reports right from the system and look up all families at one time. So here you’ll see the different family accounts that I can choose from. I can search by any family account it’s going to recognize a kid’s last name as well as a parent’s last name, so if they have a different last name than the child, then I type in let’s say the child’s name. It will pull up the family account, even if it’s a different last name.
So let me just take you through a quick look at let’s just say one I can look up. The Jacko family. Here’s a good example where one Jacko family has a different last name, but since I looked up Jacko, it showed the Saunders family as well as the second family with that last name. When I take a quick look at this first family, what you’ll see is a bunch of registrations for two different children, as well as more information about each. It’s my internet that’s slow, I apologize.
Katelyn Kasella: It’s totally fine.
SR: Two kids upstairs, online classes, you know how that works right.
KK: Oh yeah work from home struggles.
SR: Oh it’s a joy. So when I take a look at this Jacko family, you’ll see a couple kids of Sierra, you’ll see Sierra and Brooke. You’ll see their status of final clearance, if I need any reason to look at the registration form I can look at what was filled out in the registration form. It’s going to date and time stamp it too, so you can see that hey, this was filled out on January 15th, 2020, by this parent. So there’s any reason you have to track back and see that family account, you always can, and you can see all this information in there. Let’s say they said, oh I didn’t fill anything out about insurance or random drug testing, I could say yeah but you did, and here’s who did it and here’s the date and time on it. You also can cancel or change registrations from here in a really simple way, which I love.
So if for some reason Brooke had a status change to her softball last year, I could say hey she quit, hey she was cut from the team, or other, I could also just change her sport. She signed up for softball but she decided that she wanted to play, do track instead. So I can quickly just change it to track right from this screen in a really really simple way. I can also refund the money, so if I need, if I was charging and they did pay for the registration, I can come on and I can quickly do that as well. Again, apologies for taking a little extra time here.
So I wanted to show you, being able to cancel, change your registration or refund money as well. So here’s where I can issue a refund, I can select the payment and look at Brooke’s $150 payment, I can issue a refund for this payment back to the credit card, I can put it on their account if I want to . I can cancel or change the registration and say, you know what, she’s still registered but I had to refund the money for some reason. So in a really really quick and efficient way, I can refund that money if necessary.
Let me take you on a quick look at some of our reports. So you have the coaches, you have the ability to allow your coaches to come out and see reports themselves, so you could allow your coaches to come on and see hey, what kids from my team have signed up for the sport so far early in the process. Let’s say right at the beginning, they may check this weekly, you may send them those reports weekly of hey, who has signed up so far for my specific sport. So let me give you an example of that.
If I wanted to look at let’s say my 2021 spring high school athletic packet, and I just wanted to look at a specific sport, let me look at my varsity baseball, and I’m only looking at varsity baseball now because we’ve moved our teams over, normally you would just be looking at baseball, but we’ve sort of converted our teams over to specific levels at this point. So here, you can see just a very quick report of who has registered for baseball so far. The kid’s name, if they paid, again, not really something that the coaches have to worry about, you can see how much you’ve collected in payments. What you’ll notice is that there weren’t a lot of charges here for no fee. That means that kids paid for another sport or maybe parking earlier in the year. You can take this, you can email this out, you can export it, so if you wanted to right now, it defaults to the order is based on when they registered. But if you want to put it in output order, you can just export it to excel and go right from there. So that’s just a very simple report.
You can break it down to a detailed report and look it up by anything. Here’s a great one which is our physical date and form report, which we use all the time, and so we use this to basically check off, our nurse would come in and basically check off to make sure that kids are eligible medically, and then we would leverage that and send all that information out to our community, and to the family specifically. So if I wanted to take a quick look, let me just use baseball and varsity baseball here as an example, and I wanted to run a report on that. What you’ll see here is the ability to see physical dates, physical forms, I can look at custom eligibility view, where it lets me come on here and throw on the physical date, so I can say hey this kid’s physical was on April 7th.
I can look at when he filled out a health history and for your trainers if you’re doing baseline testing or anything like that, the trainers can come in and put a date for baseline concussion testing. It will also send reminders out to families through our system. If it’s a good for a year, it will send out reminders, you can set it up to some reminders, like 30 days before, two weeks before, a day before, or all three. Here’s where you can see if a kid has a medical alert, what it is, and this is where we basically send out final clearances.
So my nurse would come on, it would start out as pending, but my nurse would come on and change it once this family or this child is eligible to play, she would come on and she would click add. You’ll also see that this envelope here which is basically saying that hey, you know what, we emailed this family on March 22nd at 10:35 a.m. letting them know that they were eligible to play incase they wondered. So this lets me come on and say hey, I’m looking at this young man, he is now eligible. I want to send a notification both to the parent and to the coach and I want to use the existing template. I’ll save that, and you’ll see it default to here is all the people using my system. It defaults to the parents in my system, as well as the student. And I can come down and check off my coach too. So now, basically I’m sending out a message that says hey, this guy is cleared to play baseball, and final status approved.
If this was not cleared, it would send a different message and it would even let you come on and say something very specific, such as he owes his asthma form right, or he owes an allergy form, and see attached. So that allows for our nurse to come on, attach that asthma or allergy form, let the parents and coach know that the child is not eligible because they owe that form, and oh my god can I tell you how much time that saves me in phone calls and in paperwork in my office. It’s just a level of communication to our parents, into our community, that I never had before. And it’s done in such an easy way that saves us so much time.
The first year using this program, I’ve seen ADs literally paperwork themselves in schools in schools weren’t willing to, just because of how much time it saves. So that’s just a really quick look at our activity registration program. I promise it will save you so much time, let me just finally say that all this information goes into our activity scheduling program that I showed you before.
So let me give you one really quick look in our student eligibility area, when they register for a sport it will track them for that sport. So here’s a great example that dummy account that I set up before registered for boys lacrosse. That automatically showed up in my system, my coach went on to the app when they chose varsity, JV, and freshman teams, moved that athlete over from the app to the varsity lacrosse team. Now I’ve got a full activity history for this kid in my system, I can print certificates at the end of the year, so if I want to print varsity certificates, I click a couple buttons, I can print varsity certificates, and this kid will be included.
If I have special awards, let’s say this was his fourth varsity letter and I had a special aware for that, I’d be able to run a report just on four-year varsity letter winners, and know that this kid, as well as others, have four varsity letters in lacrosse. So I’m able to basically leverage all that information that’s collected in registration that my coaches then put, move kids over and roster, and use all that information for my athletic department for my assistant moving forward. Thank you so much, that’s a great look at our activity registration program.
VNN’s Katelyn Kasella sat down with Scott Rosenberg, rSchoolToday’s VP of Sales, to get a demo of their top four products for high school athletics. Here’s a close look at product #4, the Daily Health Screening App.
Scott Rosenberg: Hi everybody. Right now I’d like to show you our daily health screening app. Unfortunately, we had to add this this year with COVID. We were completely aware that schools and athletic programs would need a solution for doing those daily health screening questions, filling them out and making sure that they were in. I think the greatest thing about it is that you could do this on, let’s say a Google Doc, things like that, but the problem becomes not who submitted the forms, but more who’s missing. Like who’s supposed to have the form in but didn’t. And so what we’ve created is the ability to, through our system, have kids, athletes, logged into a specific program since they’ve registered for that program or coaches that put them in a program, and then let’s say for my baseball team who has submitted and who hasn’t submitted, if there’s any red flags for the daily screen.
So right now you’re taking a look at our app that goes with our activity scheduling program. But what I’m going to do is give you a quick look at our daily health screening. And so the first thing I’m going to show you up top here is an individual filling it out. So when I go to daily health screening, I’m pulling this up really as myself. And as coach, first thing I’ll do is I’ll go to the profile tab in the top right. Just to show you the fact that people can sign up for multiple accounts. So if you had multiple kids, you can have multiple accounts on one phone, or one app.
For parents, the other thing that it lets you do is come on and choose if you want to be reminded or not through settings about to fill this out every morning. Let’s say, so I can say remind me every day, and I love this, and you may just be doing this Monday through Friday if you’re on a team. You might say I want to be reminded in your practice every weekend, hey you know I want to be reminded Monday through Saturday, but I really don’t want that sort of wake up reminder through a push notification on Sundays, so I can quickly set it to remind me just Monday through Saturday 7 a.m.
Highly recommend it right. You want your student athletes first thing in the morning to have that push notification so they don’t forget to do it. You can see also here if I’ve submitted my form or not, which by the way I haven’t in like five days, but it’ll track that. It then allows me to come out and we can customize this. This is what’s so great from the administrative side, our recruiting questions have changed since August, so we’ve had to change them as well. But you can even put up anything or everything that you need for your school. I have some camps using this right now that are putting up even questions for camp, like what lunch do you want today, and letting them choose between pizza, bagels, Chinese food, and anything else for lunch that day through this app.
But this is where you’d come on and you’d have those questions and have the ability for kids to say yes or no. It defaults to no, it allows you also to say, click on temperature, have a temperature gauge where you can either put your thumb on it and move it up or down, or you can come in and you can just sort of type in the temperature if needed. That’s not necessarily something that you have to give people access to here. You’ll see mine where it just says we only want people filling this out if the temperature is over 100.4.
You can have these yes no questions, you can also have short answer or fill in questions as well. All of mine have just really kind of defaulted to no, and force them to go ahead and submit it if’s different. This would let me come on and hit submit for the day. It’s going to tell me that I’ve submitted that for today, and that I don’t need to do it again. If I was to go on and try and do it again, it would quickly tell me it’s already been submitted for the day.
That’s just a really quick look, but it’s just so easy of the administrative side, from the coaches or administrator side. The great part is being able to just see your specific team, and we can set these up for you. What you’re looking at here is a look of just my varsity softball team. This year my coach has access to this, my trainer, and myself have access to this. What you can see is that these are the kids so far today that have not submitted it, sorry about that.
As I scroll down you can see the kids who have submitted it. So three girls submitted it, you can see the times they submitted it. If anybody submitted this and had a red flag, they would be up top. So if any kid submitted it and said they had COVID issues, you would see them with a big sort of red mark, an X, and also you can set anybody up to receive automatic notifications if there’s a red flag. So if there was one, as the athletic director, I would get an email that said hey this kid submitted one that has a red flag. So that’s amazing to just have everything in one place.
Again, I can come in here as the AD and filter this out by anything. So right now you can see that this is filtered by softball, but if I wanted to look at my baseball team today, and let’s say not my softball team, I would just come on, click off baseball, unclick softball, hit select, and then view that filter. So now what you’ll see is as I just kind of refresh, here’s my baseball team. It looks like my teams are about, my baseball team is doing a better job so far today in terms of numbers. So you can see now from my baseball team everybody who’s put this in.
We also have a desktop view that has all kinds of stats and analytics that you can run at any time. So you can see what percentage of kids have submitted it for the day, what percentage of kids are red flags. This is great for contact tracing, I can always go back days, weeks, to see who submitted things with the red flag. On a specific team, on a specific day, if I ever have to track back to sort oof see you know that more global picture for contact tracing.
So again, we can actually sync this with your student information system too. We’re working with the smallest schools to the biggest. We have Newark Public Schools here in New Jersey with I think about 50,000 students and they use this everyday for their classes. So every single night we sync this. If there’s new students coming in, students leaving, it syncs it to the system. It puts kids in specific schools, they put kids in specific home rooms that change even in their high school every day. And it allows that sync to take place every night so that you’re looking at apples to apples.
If you’re thinking about even a rotating block scheduling situation, where teachers are checking kids into their first period class each day, but it rotates, we can set that up so that it rotates for you. So there’s just tremendous depth to this program, yet ease for people to fill out. So I really encourage you to think about this program. If you run camps if you know people who run camps, this is a great program for camps as well. They’re looking for solutions and it’s a very inexpensive program. You’re looking at about 90 cents per student or camper for an entire year.
So that’s a quick look at our daily health screening app.
VNN’s Katelyn Kasella sat down with Scott Rosenberg, rSchoolToday’s VP of Sales, to get a demo of their top four products for high school athletics. Here is an inside look at the third product, the Facilities Scheduler.
Scott Rosenberg: I’m now going to show you our facility scheduler, part of our facilities management system here at rSchoolToday. This is an amazing program that basically allows you to have internal and external groups schedule space. It speaks to our activity scheduling program in real time, and that’s a lot of the magic. One of the things that I know as an athletic director is it’s difficult and it’s a pain point for so many districts, that you have separate athletic scheduling programs from whatever you’re using to book facilities for internal groups, external groups.
And so you’re looking at two separate calendars right. As an example, I’ve got a varsity basketball game in my main gym at 7 o’clock on Friday night in January, but I’ve also got a recreation group that wants to request space to use that same gym on certain nights. In my facility, I’ve also, if you thing about the school day or right after school, I may have somebody who runs the chess club who wants to use the gymnasium or who wants to use a cafeteria or an auditorium or some space, and we need to make sure that we’re not double booking space. So it really allows for one amazing calendar.
It allows for an app that you can see all events in one place. Superintendents love this, principals love this, they can literally go onto an app and see everything that’s happening in the district in one location. I also highly recommend sharing something like this with your local law enforcement, so another great example would be God forbid that there’s an emergency in a school district and the police have to be involved, they literally can go onto the app and know in a specific building or specific location in the building exactly who’s supposed to be there.
So if there’s an emergency in your high school they could listen, I’ve got the musical going on the in the auditorium with an expected 40 kids there from three o’clock, five o’clock, at the same time I’ve got a basketball game going on in the gym, and at the same time I’ve got a club meeting in one classroom, and I’ve got the girl scouts from town meeting in a separate classroom in the school. It just gives them so much great information right at their fingertips even right on the app.
That’s amazing, and you can also have this calendar share with your community. But you can choose not to show who’s using the space, it can just show as booked or reserved so that people can see that there’s things going on in the school, or if they’re looking at book space that’s used, but not necessarily see who’s using that space.
So here’s a great look on this screen of a facilities calendar of a specific number of gyms in a school district. So these are just the high school and middle school gyms and what’s being used for a specific day. Thursday December 12th in gyms, your district you can do a monty view, a weekly view, a daily view, or you can pull up a list view for all the schools, or maybe just the one school.
Again, I was mentioning before that we work with about 9,000 schools, we work with a lot of state athletic associations as well. Here’s that same look as I was mentioning for the public to see. And again, you can say these are the groups that are in there or not, but it lets them really see what’s going on if they want to request space. It does that real time checking with their activity scheduler, so if you’re using our activity schedule or another, we’re working on the ability to allow this to sync with other activity schedulers as well to do real time conflict checking and data sharing.
If you’re using Google or Microsoft this is so cool right. If you’re booking your own space or own events using your Google or Microsoft calendars, you’re just in your phone or you’re on that on the desktop at work, we can actually have that integrate to this system. So if I schedule a meeting as an athletic director in a specific conference room right. Through Google, I can actually send that check to make sure that there are no conflicts and send that event right to my Google calendar, I write to my facilities calendar and we’ll write into that, and vice versa with Microsoft coming back even to the phone.
Again, this is great for outside groups like scouts clubs, community organizations, youth sports, dance groups. It also allows you to collect money through the system. So if you’re charging for outside groups to rent space in your performing arts center, you can collect money right through credit for a credit card process right through our system. If they don’t pay, you can turn them off and not give them the ability to request space anymore, you can invoice from the system.
There’s just, it’s really deep and it gives you so many options. Here’s a quick look at the approval process. So we give your a beautiful front-facing website, probably you would share it on your district calendar, your school calendar right for facility requests click here. You would then have a site that looks great, you can put lots of customized information on it. And then people for the first time would say hey, I want to be somebody that requests space in your facility, it gives you the option to say yes or no. It gives you the option to collect things like their insurance forms, their emails, their phone numbers, so that you know who they are and then it gives you the option of saying yes, you can request space at my district, or no we’re not going to allow groups like you to come in and request space. It then, once approved, allows groups to come on and say hey, I want to use your space on these specific.
Let’s say Wednesdays in April, May and June, but hey there’s one Wednesday the 15th of June that I don’t want to use it instead, I want to use it on the 13th and 14th Sunday, Monday, and I want to use it from six o’clock to eight o’clock. It’s going to save based on what you set up, allow that group to say I want to use gyms, I want to be in this specific building, I want to book space based on the equipment or other needs only, so it gives you so many tremendous options.
Here’s a great picture of being able to get a snap shot of the facility. Here’s a picture of it, here’s how much we charge for that facility, you even have the ability to come on and say hey, so like if they’re a community group and they’re a tier one client, we don’t charge them except for custodial overtime. But if they’re an outside organization for profit, we charge them to rent the space, we charge them for custodians, we charge them for air conditioning, and it will automatically add those fees in to the invoice or the proposed contract that we’re going to be able to send out electronically. Heck you can even throw in room layouts for your custodians and for the custodial of course. So hey, I want this room set up in banquet style, or in theater style, it just gives you amazing options.
It also allows you to come in and choose equipment associated with that. So this was this specific gym, and you allow them to rent out this flat screen TV, the scoreboard for that space, desk chairs, anything and everything. The PA system, they can book that space right from their request. You also then have the ability to set up an approval routing system. So there may be different people internally who have to approve space. So for example, if in a specific location like an aquatic center at your school, you have an aquatics director. You may say that first, the request goes first to the aquatics director, then it goes to the athletic director, then it goes to some sort of central office staff, that all gets done electronically.
One person approves it electronically, moves on to the next. In other situations you may just say it’s just the athletic director who has the final approval. And so the athletic director for the gym approves the space. You have the ability to break that down by who’s requesting the space that’s being requested as well and choose different people to be that approval routing process. You’ll have the ability to add in other charges, send out electronic agreements with proposed costs and language, add facility, campus maps, other sort of documents that can be signed off on to those groups requesting space who would then sign it electronically.
Once agreed to that, they get a permit sent to them that they can carry with them. That information then goes to, if you’d like, to the finance office who can batch and generate e-invoices, send them out to the people that get sent out. Those groups like the youth basketball group in this case, could pay electronically, they could send in a check and then it lets you sort of keep track of everything in one place. It also send out amazing custodial report.
So you set this up, I send mine out every Friday at noon, so my report gets sent out to my head custodians every single Friday at noon for the following week. They can either print out that, email it out to their staff, it’s also a living document, it’s a live link, so if anything changes from Friday to the next week on the day of the event. First of all, the custodians will be set up to receive an email and or text message with a change, and it also will reflect in that live link on the custodial setup report as I mentioned.
It also goes to the facility’s mobile app so that everybody has access to it right through the mobile app. So here’s a great snapshot of one event and who has access to it by virtue of who signed up for information. Classroom teachers, catering and food services, the client maitenance custodians, maybe phys ed teachers, the athletic director, secretaries. Everybody there has been informed via email, text message, access to the locations. As I mentioned you can send out financial reports, you can batch invoice of some from 30 to 61 days overdue. If I want to send out and say hey, you’re overdue, I can check off 31 to 60 days, and send out one report, I’m sorry one email to all those groups that are 31 to 60 days overdue.
This, we like to say that we want to leverage data. So you enter information once, and we leverage that across all our systems for facility scheduler activities. We have a district master calendar, your camps, if you wanted to have camps, you can schedule your camps through this. Camps are tied to locations, so we can collect money for camps, yet we can make sure that the facility is tied to those camps as well. So that’s just a really quick look at this facility scheduler, which again, if you look at the wide variety of products that we offer, basically ties to this whole sports management platform.
VNN’s Katelyn Kasella sat down with Scott Rosenberg, rSchoolToday’s VP of Sales, to get a demo of their top four products for high school athletics. Here is an inside look at the first product, the Activities Scheduler.
Scott Rosenberg: So thank you. I’m about to show you guys our amazing award-winning activity schedule. This is what athletic directors use really on a daily basis to stay organized, to inform the public about all the events taking place, both athletically and pro activities. That’s one of the differentiators, I feel like between our product and many others, is just the ease of scheduling clubs and activities, outside groups, and things like that, all within this athletic platform. Because, let’s face it, most of those things are tied to facilities, and those facilities are used not only by athletics, but also by these clubs, activities, and outside groups.
So it’s really important to have everything in one place as you take a look at my screen, what you’ll see is today’s events. This is my school, and this is what’s going on today at Kinnelon High school here in New Jersey. You can see some things crossed out, you can see some things in bold. So, for example, anything that’s bold is a home event, as opposed to anything that’s not bold being an away event. And then anything that has changed or been cancelled will show in red, so you can see here that today’s game was moved from a couple days ago when we had a rain out.
If I was to go back and take a look at two days ago on the 28th, what you’ll see is that that game was moved here from the 28th to the 30th, so it also lets you sort of track the history of where games came from, where they moved to. So again, when I take a look at today’s events, I can easily see what’s going on at home as opposed to where I can look at these events and look for more detail of these events. So if I was to take a quick look at this event here, I can see who the officials are, I can see their phone numbers.
This is great information. It also goes right over to our amazing app, so if as a site manager, as an athletic director, if I was at an event and the referees hadn’t shown up yet, I’d easily have the ability to quickly look, see their phone numbers, make a phone call right from the app or from this web version, see their phone numbers, and make a quick phone call. You would also see any location details, any bus times, or comments associated with this event as well. So you have everything sort of all in one place. I wanted to take you quickly through a couple things that I think make this the magic, make it wonderful and easy to use.
One is the advanced view. And so the advanced view is something that I use weekly where I send out a report to my entire staff letting them know what’s going on in my building, in their classrooms. Teachers often take ownership of their classrooms, so they want to know, hey is there an SAT class in my room that night, do I clean up that room differently, do I erase the chalk board, whiteboard, things like that. So I’ll run a quick report here for this week. I’ll show maybe some extra space between events, and then I’ll also look to see some other more detailed options here.
And also, so I might want to show my bus company name right. We will have like seven different buses lined up outside my school to pick up some different teams sometimes on a daily basis, and so it’s great if my coaches would know, let’s say what company, or even the bus driver’s name or who’s going to pick them up. This way they know which bus to go to, and they’re not kind of trying to figure out which bus is theirs.
I can also show things like game workers. I can show officials cell phone numbers, game workers, I can show their cell phone numbers as well. So when I run that report, what you’ll see here is what I would actually email out to my staff every single week. And so this has literally everything going on in my building. It would also encourage my teachers and staff to maybe come take a look at their student athletes playing in some of the games. So they get this every single week, again, you can see some details here like the officials, the bus.
So here’s an example I have of Kinderland.edu, board of education, but for my JV golf team going to this location, there’s a 3 o’clock bus. Here is a situation where my JV lacrosse team is traveling with the varsity team, so that we know they’re on one bus from O’down at 2:45 on a specific day. So that’s just a great report that I can go ahead and click print, email out, whatever I need to do, and I do that usually every single Monday morning. And that’s really helpful to our staff.
A couple other great features are the ease of adding events. Here’s an example of adding a club activity, practice, and what I do is I go to what we call rSchoolToday only area, and so if I wanted to schedule let’s say test dates in my building, and I had a list of them for the entire year, I can say listen, I want to go and schedule it from 8 o’clock a.m. until 2 o’clock p.m., and then I can choose locations that we already have built into the system within my school here. We can choose multiple locations so I could say I’m going to be in room 211, 103, 105, 107, and 206. This is going to reserve that space and make sure it’s open and make sure that nobody else later can go ahead and grab that space for those dates. So I can say listen these are, we’re going to have these on the first Saturday of every month, and I can add those dates.
And if I want to move forward even to let’s say the next three months, I could come and move forward and add the next three months as well. So I could literally do a year’s worth of ACT testing just on one screen. I also can send an invited to anybody associated with that event. So if I had Alice Kiblon as the person who’s running the ACT testing, I can send her an invite. She would receive an email, she’ll be able to drop these dates right into her phone to her calendar, and we can also even add attachments.
So if you had a fundraiser or something like that, you wanted to include an attachment, you’d be able to do that from the screen as well. So what this would do is take these six dates, save them, make sure that nothing else is going on in those classrooms that I was reserving already on those dates and make sure there’s no conflicts. So just a really easy way to add tons and tons of events with just the click of a few buttons. I do that for almost everything. I have outside groups using track practices, I have inside groups like chess club using a room every couple weeks, things like that.
Adding games is really simple through our platform as well. We have the ability to basically present locations. So for example, when I was, if I was to add a schedule it would allow me to come on and say, hey, if my baseball team plays at a park in town and on a specific park in town, it would recognize that. As I was creating a varsity baseball schedule, so I really quickly wanted to take you through what that looks like, and let everybody know how easy it is to schedule a sport. So I’m going to give you a schedule for 22 and 23. I would create a new schedule for the spring of 23, I would choose softball let’s say in this case, I might say girls, and I’ll say I’m going to choose a varsity schedule. This also allows you to record the history as you’re scheduling it. So this will let you know, hey what date did you schedule these games, if your administrative assistant came on and your administrative assistant scheduled games, it would say that the administrative assistant added this game, as opposed to you. Just a really nice way to track back to make sure you know who did the scheduling.
I don’t know, my life gets crazy and sometimes I’m like where did this game come from, I don’t even remember scheduling it. And it lets me really do a quick look and audit of who added that game and when. So here’s just an example of adding a schedule or a game I should say. My best practice would be to add home games first. So I might add my first home game for a season of 2023. We have a drop down menu for event types, as you can see we have games, scrimmages, tournaments, specific names of tournaments, all in there for you. We also assume that you’re both, I’m going to be either the home team or the away team. So we’re going to just say we’re going to put you as both, and then you only have too come and change one. Again, we will pre-load all these into the system for you, but you can easily add them on the fly.
When I come in and I first schedule and I know that this game is going to be at Kindeline Recreation Park, and I find that location, what you’ll see is that automatically it popped up that it’s going to be at Kindeline Recreation Park. But we’re going to be on the varsity softball field, and you’ll see it already defaulted to 4 o’clock til 6:30. So these upside down triangles allow you to save this for every game that you schedule subsequently. So what I mean is as I hit save and add another, I’ve scheduled my first home game. It saves all this information already. Hey, where are we playing, what fields are we playing on, what time is a game, so literally all I need to do is come on and type where’s my next home game. This is going to be on a Saturday, just change my opponent, and literally I can move forward from there, hit save, and add another.
So if you really think about a 20 game schedule, let’s just say 10 home and 10 away games, how easily you can do this, so I would do my home schedule that way, then I would come on and I would quickly say well here’s my first away game on 4/8. That then lets me come on and choose the away team, keep myself as the home tam, keep myself as the away team, then choose the location where we are playing that game.
Let’s just say it’s at the White Mar High School, save the time, and hit save and add another. Now I’ve scheduled two home and two away games very quickly. And then the beauty of this being able to take this varsity softball schedule and make it, let’s say the JV schedule, or even change it into the baseball schedule or move it forward for a year or two of a schedule. So let me show you what that looks like.
If I go into this 22/23 season, you’ll see this varsity softball schedule that I just created, what I can do is I can use our copy feature. This copy feature is amazing, again to say change this schedule to JV or make it the spring of 2-24, or make this the varsity baseball schedule, but maybe just come in and swap home and away as opposed. Because that’s what usually our schedules look like, and then just make some quick edits. So let’s say independent games, so let me give you a quick example. I can come on, I can say I want to take the schedule, make it the JV schedule, but I want to use what we call the activity parameters, so what I’m really trying to do here is say I’m not going to flip any dates or game or locations, but all I want to do is use what I’ve set, which is going to be the JV softball team, plays the same day as the varsity softball team at the same location. The only thing that will change though is the field. So they’re not going to play in the varsity softball field at that park, they’re going to play on the JV field by setting these things in advance.
It’s going to let me come and create a JV schedule the same as the varsity, but just change the field location. So that’ll just take a second, but here’s what you’ll notice before, it would have showed varsity softball field, now it’s showing JV softball field. So literally I don’t have to change the schedule at all. Yet, if maybe for some reason Jackson Liberty didn’t have a JV team, I could come in and just delete this one. Sorry I’m having a hard time clicking it. But I could come in and literally just delete the one JV game and keep the integrity of the rest of the schedule, so that lets me create varsity, JV, freshman schedule really quickly and save those.
I could also come on as I mentioned and I could go ahead and I can copy that schedule again and make it that baseball schedule. In that case what I might do is say hey, let’s take that schedule from this year, make it the varsity baseball schedule. But I just want to swap women away, and so I can quickly take that change, make it varsity baseball, send it to the opposite locations, and then like I said just maybe change up the independent games or delete any games that the varsity baseball team doesn’t play that’s the same amount of the softball team. So that’s just another great feature of the program.
Let me quickly show you transportation. Transportation can be a headache for a lot of people. Our best practice is to get your games into the schedule first, and then you can drop your transportation or you can give it to your transportation director. You can give them a login that just allows them to work on transportation. We’re going to assume that for games, it’s away, but if you had a softball team like I showed you where they played out of parks and you needed busing, you would go ahead and say we’re going to play. We need a bus for both home and away games.
So here’s a great example. I’ll take a look at my soccer schedule, I’ll look at my varsity and maybe my varsity boys schedule from this year, and take a look at our transportation. What you’ll see here is here were all my varsity boys soccer games where I needed busing for this year. And I don’t know about you, but most schools kind of, we leave at the same time. My school gets out at 2:30, we try and be on a bus for 2:45 for the vast majority of our games. And most of our games are 4 o’clock, so this really allows me to come on here and choose 2:45, click this upside down triangle, and choose that as my default time. 2:45 for all games for the entire season, then if I had a game where hey, here’s a Saturday or here’s a 7 p.m. game, but I had to come in and just change one, I could come in and just change that one game, make that 5:45.
You can also choose things like different bus companies, we can set them up so I use a company called First Student or Jersey Kids, or I use my own busing, and as I was mentioning, this allows your coaches to quickly see when they’re outside the building waiting for bus, what bus they’re supposed to take. Maybe the name of a bus driver, so I’ll throw Diane as our bus driver, and that will show up on the report for the week. And it’s very simple to change and edit that. Let me just run back through a couple other amazing features.
I love our coaches area. Most of us have coaches that have to be certified in order to be able to coach. That could be a CPR, and AED certification, that could be concussion certification, it could be heat illness, that kind of stuff, prevention certification, there’s so many different things.
So what this does is it lets you come on and let you say hey, what makes a coach eligible here in my school or in my state, and it lets you set parameters for how long that certification lasts, so here’s a great example of what I’ve set up for my school for us. We use CPR, AED from American Heart Association, it’s good for two years, so we’ve set that as a two-year number so that the system will understand when it runs out and when coaches need to be re-certified. Our NFHS concussion class is good for one year, our NFHS coaching course is good for their career, so that’s just a check box. So in that case we would have a check box and once it’s checked once it’s good and it carries forward for their careers.
So once we set that, we go into our coaches area and it lets us basically type in or put in when our coaches expire, when their certifications expire. And let me show you what that looks like. It also lets us set up coaches to be able to use our app to put in schedule, scores, practices, and things like that as well. Let m just run back and show you from our coaches info side.
And when we look here at Marissa, who was coaching varsity volleyball for us, you can see the heat and illness, when it ran out, concussion, CPR, AED, and things like that. That then allows me to run amazing reports right at the beginning of each season. So I’ll come on and I’ll do an eligibility report prior to my season. It also sends out automatic alerts to myself and to my coaches when their certifications are going to run out. So I can come here and say listen, I’m going to go back to the fall of 2020, I want to show any notes and any expiration dates for all my coaches for the fall of 2020. This kind of replaces having to do this on an Excel spreadsheet.
And so here’s just a great report I would run. I can email it, download it, or print it. You can see all my coaches for the season and you can see when they took their CPR, AED, moving it ahead two years, concussion, heat illness, first aid, things like that. It’s just a really really efficient way to stay organized.
Let me jump back to our main control panel. Message center is another really great contact management system for us. So this allows you to send email messages to any kinds of different groups, to coaches, to parents who have signed up to be notified about game changes. It allows you to utilize our activity registration platform and if parents have registered their students for participation, it allows you to choose by group. So for example I can say I want to send a message out to just parents of a specific team. So I can say for the 2021 school year, I can quickly look and say hey, I just want to send a message out to let’s say my baseball team.
So again, if we had a big game coming up, kid’s going for his 20th win, kid’s going for his fifth career home run, who knows. You can just say I want to send out a message to everybody associated with baseball, run that report and send an email out just to that group. So just a really smooth, easy way to send out messages to anybody associated with your pipeline.
We have the ability without going into too much detail, to set up our officials, to set up game contracts, to use game workers, to send our game workers contracts, to send them reminders if they’re, if I have somebody doing our football announcing, site manager, security, we even have a program coming out this summer that lets them sign up to be game workers from themselves as opposed to us registering them for that as well. So that’s just a really quick overview of our amazing scheduler. And I’d like to move on and show you some of our other programs.
CEO of VNN Rick Ehrman explains the mission of VNN Sports.
Rick Ehrman: We’re all in this for the same reason, to make athletic director’s of high schools jobs easier. We’re all in this to provide tools that create more time and save money, and everyone involved is passionate about youth and high school athletics.
Find out what everyone’s talking about at VNNSports.net.
VNN’s Romy Glazer counts down the top plays in high school sports from athletic departments across the country.
Watch as Romy Glazer from VNN reviews some of the highlights from VNN Network schools this week. Plays come from high schools such as Cascade (OR), White Knoll (SC), Riverwood (GA), South Bend Adams (IN), and Grandview (WA).