Within the Child Care Registration Options, each individual Program can indicate whether new first time families/accounts may register for a new Season.
When the option for Allow First Time and Inactive Accounts to Register is set to No, the system will not allow a student without an active contract in the current (approved with a start date of today or already started) or one season past to register a new contract. This includes families with Non-School Day only contracts and if a contract has been withdrawn, provided it was accepted at some point in the current or one season past (and was not removed/deleted).
For example, if this is set to No, a student who attended in a School Year Season would be allowed to register for an upcoming School Year Season during the summer months because it is one season past.
Additionally, any new family members (siblings) would be able to register since it is an Account based setting. However, if a family has not had any contracts with this specific Child Care Program before (or a contract in the current season that hasn't yet started), they will not be allowed to register.
Setting Allow First Time and Inactive Accounts to Register to Yes will allow anyone to request a contract. Since all contracts submitted online are pending, ultimately, staff have control over who gets into their program.
If your team wants to create a 'priority' registration period, you could set the Allow First Time and Inactive Accounts to Register to No at first during the dates/times you wish only current families to register then manually modify the Registration Options and change it to Yes when that time you consider 'priority' has ended.
To set the option to allow first-time accounts to register or not register:
- Point to Child Care
- Select Registration Options
- Select the desired Registration Option then select the Modify option.
- Change the setting to Allow First Time and Inactive Accounts to Register to reflect the desired choice.
- Select Save.
If your system is not allowing families from one previous season to register, check the Start and End date of all previous Seasons to make sure there is no overlap of dates into the current Season. This can be audited from the Child Care > Seasons list view by reviewing the Start and End Date columns.