Cloud Computing

Texas Charters Turn to SaaS for New Student Management

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 10/10/16

Texas charter schools are increasingly turning to the cloud for new student management services. Three charter operators in the state have recently gone public with their decision to work with SchoolMint for automating their application, lottery and registration processes through online services.

Texas is a major proponent of charters. According to one 2014-2015 count, the state had 721 different charter schools, representing almost 190,000 students, four percent of the entire population of students there.

Among the public charters that have picked up subscriptions to SchoolMint are KIPP in San Antonio, IDEA Academy and YES Prep in Houston.

SchoolMint is designed to work with popular K-12 student information systems, including PowerSchool and SunGard's eSchoolPlus. The company said it is currently serving about a fifth of the entire charter school population in the state.

"User friendliness was an important must-have when we were looking to implement a new system to manage our enrollment processes," said Jaciel Castro, student recruitment manager for KIPP, in a press release. "We conducted a rigorous review of various systems and time and time again were drawn to SchoolMint because of its unparalleled user experience — it was comprehensive and easy to use, and we could trust it would be the best fit for all of our stakeholders."

"SchoolMint's overall functionality, especially its reporting and communication features, was a big draw for us," added Javier Dimas, vice president of campus operations for IDEA. "Having the ability to easily input and analyze student data and customize reports will allow us to make important data-driven enrollment and operational decisions. In addition, SchoolMint's mobile solution allows us to more effectively communicate with parents and keep them updated about their child's enrollment status via text messaging. This is especially important since many of our parents don't have email addresses."