Every year, the team at Jackrabbit Class sets out to make some incredible product enhancements. This year’s enhancement lineup includes releasing a feature that allows parents to schedule absences and makeups for their kids directly from the Jackrabbit Parent Portal. News flash: that enhancement is done!
To accomplish any significant product enhancement, there is typically a beta process, where the early feature is provided to a group of Jackrabbit users so tweaks can be made as it is analyzed in a live-use environment. This is where The Academy of Russian Ballet became involved with the new capabilities for scheduling absences and makeups in Jackrabbit.
Kimberly Henderson, office manager and administrator, was very excited to be part of the beta process for perfecting the use of scheduling absences and makeups through the Jackrabbit Parent Portal. The new game-changing enhancement enables parents to schedule makeups for absences that have already taken place and gives them the ability to send alerts about absences in the future. How convenient is that?
Jackrabbit Class makes managing multiple locations easy from anywhere
Jackrabbit’s powerful cloud-based software gives Kimberly the tools she needs to manage the details for The Academy of Russian Ballet’s two locations in Herndon and Manassas, Virginia from either location or from her home.
Jackrabbit’s latest enhancement to the Parent Portal now makes it convenient for parents to manage their children’s classes at The Academy of Russian Ballet, too. Because parents are managing the absence and makeup details regarding their own students, hours of office administrative time are saved and the complexities caused by unwieldy policies in this area are eliminated.
Benefits of Jackrabbit’s latest enhancement: scheduling absences and makeups
Before parents were able to schedule absences and makeups through the Jackrabbit Parent Portal Kimberly experienced:
- disruption caused by students showing up last-minute to makeup a class,
- difficulty in effectively tracking makeups for students who didn’t schedule their makeup class ahead of time, and
- revenue lost from the inability to keep students from taking more makeups than classes they’ve missed
New policies inspired by Jackrabbit’s newest enhancement
“It is amazing that we’re now seeing the ability to schedule absences and makeups through the Jackrabbit Parent Portal! This will be very convenient for our parents but will also greatly help our administrative processes. Now we will be able to offer technology-supported policies that make sure the makeups we provide are warranted.”
Giving parents the ability to schedule absences and makeups in their Parent Portal inspired Kimberly to put some new office policies in place:
- Makeups must be scheduled 24 in advance of class day and time.
- Makeups must be done within 30 days of the absence.
- Makeups cannot be combined and used in lieu of fees.
New policies provide greater confidence in numbers
The new policies at The Academy of Russian Ballet immediately produced positive results in two amazing ways:
- Setting the stage for a more organized office. New policies helped cut out the chaos of last-minute makeup requests.
- Offering parents a way to take care of absence and makeup scheduling is game-changing for studio staff through process efficiency, convenience and (everyone’s favorite) time-savings!
“The information we give to parents is more accurate and we can be confident that we aren’t giving away more makeup classes than students earn. This Jackrabbit enhancement has been instrumental in giving us greater control over what is happening when parents schedule absences and makeups.”
