3 Big Advantages Of Using Boardingware For Your Pre-College Summer Program

Like traditional boarding schools, University Pre-College Programs also have a duty of care to uphold and need appropriate systems in place to ensure students are safe.In a pre-college program, students are typically given the freedom to roam on-and-off campus and explore their future school and city. They live in dorms and are under the supervision or residential advisors, similar to that of a boarding school having dorm or house parents. They also attend similar events and activities throughout the program.As our name suggests, we typically work with boarding schools, however, we also have the privilege of providing solutions for a number of University pre-college programs and I thought it would be a good idea to share how some of them are using Boardingware to fulfil their duty of care and student safety responsibilities. Here they are…

1. Plan and coordinate all your pre-college activities and events

Pre-college programs typically consist of a few classes and a number of events and activities to provide students with a real college experience. These events can range from excursions off-campus to professional sport outings or even just a simple ice cream social to mingle with fellow students.Either way, in most cases there will be multiple activities and events running at the same time and this makes it very difficult to manage each one and keep track of which students have signed-up to participate.But with Boardingware, you can manage all your pre-college events and activities in one place. Using our event coordinator, you can configure all the details of your events and streamline the sign-up process so you always have a live view of who has registered. You also have the ability to set event quotas, submission times and automated reminders.

A helpful tip we like to give pre-college programs is to create and schedule events before the program begins so you can incorporate event sign-ups during the first day of orientation. This way, students can access their Boardingware account during orientation and easily see all the events available to them. Then as students sign-up to events from their mobile device, staff will be able to see the events registrations update in real-time.

2. Keeping track of students on campus

When students aren’t attending classes, they can be found off exploring their potential future campus and socializing in common areas. This gives students the freedom to roam and explore according to their own interests but also makes it difficult for you to keep track of where everyone is.To help uphold your duty of care and ensure students are safe, many pre-college programs use Boardingware to enable students to check-in to different locations and provide you with a single source of truth to account for where they are.

With the location manager, you can map out your entire campus, and control how students check-in to each location. For every location, there are multiple check-in methods available, including electronic kiosks, NFC checkpoints and mobile apps, giving you the flexibility to customise the process to suit your schools desired level of security.

Implementing systems and processes like this can be beneficial in multiple ways. The first is having an accurate history of your students accountability. Boardingware maintains a record of all your students movements and wellbeing information, giving you one place to easily find what you need. This means no more filing cabinets and stacks of paper.Secondly, having systems in place to account for your students helps to give parents the peace of mind that their children are safe. Professional looking kiosks and check-in processes leave a good impression for parents and offer an effective way to demonstrate your duty of care.

3. Fast and effective emergency response

The third, and perhaps the biggest advantage for pre-college programs that use Boardingware is the emergency response capabilities.Most universities will have their own emergency response system, but because pre-college programs aren’t usually organised by the university, these systems are often not readily available or suitable for them.However, with Boardingware, you can create “Emergency Rolls” to customise and automate crisis response procedures to ensure the best possible outcome is achieved.

When you initiate an “Emergency Roll’ you can configure automated alerts to be sent out to staff, students and parents. Alerts are completely customisable and can be sent via mobile, email or SMS.In an emergency roll, you will see a list of all your students along with their last known location. Plus, you can also invite multiple staff users to join and help account for students from the same roll check in real-time. With all this valuable information at your fingertips, you can quickly assign resources to find and mark students as safe in the heat of the moment.

Once the roll is saved it is stored in Boardingware for good, giving you an accurate record that can be easily retrieved if required. Pre-college programs love this because it helps to tighten emergency response procedures and gives everyone peace of mind, even though students might be spread out all over campus.

Conclusion

Like traditional boarding schools, pre-college programs also have a duty of care to uphold and need appropriate systems in place to ensure students are safe.In addition to the key advantages mentioned above, Boardingware also provides summer and pre-college programs with other solutions, such as using rolls for curfew checks at the end of each night, submitting requests to streamline any approval process, and leveraging pastoral records to alert staff of critical health and wellbeing information.To learn more about how Boardingware can help your summer or pre-college program, schedule apersonal demo with one of our experts today.