In September, everything reopens together. New children arrive, educators return, meals restart, and families have a hundred questions in the same morning. If the management system is not ready, the first two weeks are spent chasing: sections created on the fly while the bell rings, registrations that do not start, a menu hastily compiled on Monday. It is not disorganization from those coordinating: it is what happens when configurations are made with the structure open, that is, at the worst possible moment.
August is the right time to get them sorted. These are operations you do once and that then hold throughout the year, with the calm of an empty structure, without the phone ringing and without anyone waiting for an immediate response. Below you will find the checklist function by function, with what happens concretely if you skip the step, and the order in which it is advisable to tackle them.
Sections and educational grades: the foundation on which everything depends
This is the first configuration because almost everything else relies on it. Define the educational grades — infants, semi-toddlers, toddlers, the groups of the kindergarten — and then the actual sections of the year, with the children assigned to each. If you manage multiple schools, remember that each location has its own settings: sections should be created where they are really needed, and it is advisable to keep the names the same as those used by educators and families in conversation, not those in documents.
If you arrive in September without defined sections, everything else will block itself. You cannot set up automations by section, staff shifts remain generic, reports and exports come out poorly aggregated. Educators end up recording on a temporary structure that someone will have to reorganize by hand, child by child, usually in late October and with data already used for some communication to the municipality.
The calendar of closures, school by school
School closures are set for each school: holidays, long weekends, training days, suspensions decided by the municipality, end of December closure, and already that of the following summer. It is worth entering them all now, while the calendar has just been approved and you have the document at hand. It’s half an hour of work that no one wants to do in September, when the calendar is needed but is no longer at the top of the pile.
If you don’t do it, for the system the closure days remain normal days. Automations record attendance, meals, and naps on dates when the structure is closed, and someone will have to delete them one by one before they end up in the counts. Families, for their part, continue to write to you to know if they should come on Monday: a configured calendar answers for you, within the app.
List of dishes and menus: dishes first, then menus
The order matters more than it seems. Weekly and seasonal menus are built starting from the list of dishes, so the first thing to do is to upload the complete list: first courses, second courses, side dishes, fruits, morning and afternoon snacks. Only after do you compose the seasonal menu and the weekly rotations. If you start from the menu without having the dishes, you stop halfway and have to start over.
The step that is most often forgotten is that of diets. A seasonal menu can be assigned to individual children, and this is how you manage allergies, intolerances, and family dietary choices in a traceable way. If you don’t prepare it in August, in September a child’s diet lives on a sheet hanging in the kitchen: the only place where no register and no report will ever go to look for it, and where a shift change is enough to lose it.
Custom fields on records
Children's, family, and staff records accept custom fields, and August is the time to decide which ones you really need. Registration protocol number, ISEE bracket, referring pediatrician, consent for photo use, clothing size, staff training enrollment and expiration: each structure has its three or four pieces of information that seem marginal and that then get asked by someone every month.
The reason to do it beforehand is practical. If the field already exists when you fill out the record in September, the data enters only once, along with everything else, and you find it in exports in PDF, Excel, and CSV without touching anything. If you create it in November instead, you have already collected that information via email or on paper and have to copy it for all enrolled children, one by one, hoping not to miss any.
Delegations for pickup and pre-registrations to close
Delegations for pickup should be recorded with the degree of kinship, not noted on the margin of a sheet. Grandparents, uncles, babysitters, the parent of another family: each authorized person is a record, with the declared relationship and verified data. It is the configuration that protects the most, because at the exit the educator needs a certain answer in ten seconds, in front of a person they may have never seen.
In the same step, close the pre-registrations received from the public form during the summer: you turn them into complete child records, with related family and delegation information, and free up the list. If you are left with pending pre-registrations on the first day, you find children present in the structure but not registered anywhere, and no daily register can work like that: educators keep the names in mind and the day is not tracked.
The automations of recurring registrations
This is the configuration that gives back the most time, and it is almost always the last one thought of. Automations record attendance, meals, activities, and naps by section, day of the week, and time slot. You set once that infants sleep from 12:30, that toddlers have psychomotricity on Tuesdays, that the lunch for the big section is at 11:45, and from then on the register fills itself according to the actual routine of the structure.
Without automations, every entry in the daily register has to be entered manually, child by child, every day: that’s dozens of touches on the phone that someone has to find time to do, usually during nap time. With automations active, educators only intervene on exceptions — who didn’t sleep today, who didn’t eat, who leaves early — and the logbook reaches families complete without additional work.
In what order to do them, and how to check that they work
If you have half a day to dedicate to it, this is the order that holds, because each line rests on the one above:
- Schools, educational grades, and sections of the new year.
- Calendar of closures for each school.
- Custom fields on records, before entering the children.
- Pre-registrations converted into records, with family and pickup delegations.
- List of dishes, then seasonal and weekly menus, then individual diets.
- Automations by section, day, and time slot.
- Staff shifts and welcome communication to families.
Then spend ten minutes on a test. Open the daily register of a section on any date in September and check that the automations have created attendance, lunch, and nap at the right times; look at the logbook, which should tell the day without gaps. Verify an assigned diet, a pickup delegation, and a closure day. If these four checks pass, you are truly ready.
In summary
The two weeks of chasing in September do not originate in September: they originate from postponed configurations. Sections and grades, closures by school, dishes and menus with diets, custom fields, delegations, and automations are six operations that in August take you a morning and that when the structure is open cost days of work taken away from the children. Do them now, verify them with a simulation, and arrive on the first day with the management already at work. If you want to try this checklist on a real structure, you have 30 days of free trial for up to 20 children. Try Easy.School for free
