Parents across Chinook’s Edge School Division will be able to register their children in kindergarten online starting Jan. 21, officials announced last week.
The move has been several years in the works and is intended to streamline the registration process and make better use of staff resources.
“This has been a significant undertaking,” Karyn Barber, associate superintendent of system services, said in a press release. “It was a huge collaborative effort between our transportation, finance and technology departments, and it also involved hard work from all of our schools.
“This will reduce a great deal of data-entry work at our schools, but in the end our biggest priority was to make the process easier for parents.”
“Principals and administration support teams in over 40 schools were required to learn and embed several online practices over the last few years, and our elementary schools in particular have been all-hands-on-deck to prepare for online kindergarten registration.”
Online registration will start in Sylvan Lake in early January, allowing school officials to test the new system prior to division-wide registration starting on Jan. 21.
The online forms will be received and looked after by the office staff at each specific school, where the principal retains their traditional role of approving the registrations coming into their school, she said.
Ted Harvey is the technology director with Chinook’s Edge.
“We are confident our families will be pleased with this process,” Harvey said in the same press release. “It simply makes it easier for parents to enroll their kids and they can do it any time, anywhere. The process provides the opportunity for them to arrange an appointment to meet the principal, too, because a digital calendar will come up as part of the online registration.
“It’s convenient and uncomplicated, and we are pleased to get underway with it. This has been a long time coming, but we wanted to be sure everything is in place because the process needs to pull many pieces together. We know that simplifying systems is a great benefit in a division the size of ours.”
For more information on the new online registration system, see cesd73.ca.
In other Chinook's Edge news, the board approved the audited financial statements for the year ended Aug. 31, 2018 during a recent special council meeting.
The move came following a presentation by treasurer Susan Roy and from the independent auditing firm that conducts the Chinook’s Edge audit.
“The audit committee of the board had reviewed details from each school and department prior to the financial statements being brought forward to the board,” officials said in a press release.
“The senior auditor, who is part of the MNP team that conducted the detailed review, indicated that the strong internal controls, policies and financial expertise that Chinook’s Edge has in place meant that the auditors found no suggestions for improvements.”
The accepted statements indicate revenue of $131 million and expenses of $129 million.
The statements will now be filed with Alberta Education and posted under Plans and Reports on the division’s website.
There are 40 schools in the Innisfail-headquartered Chinook's Edge School Division.
