Preschool program

We didn't consider that exact scenario, which is why we are doing this beta test. The team will look into what we can do to support this situation better. (Anyone in a similar situation should comment or up-vote so we'll know how many people are impacted.)

For now, you have two basic options.

The first option is you can invite your preschool director to be a coordinator on your event. To do this, go to the people page and select coordinator settings. You can also define separate roles for preschool volunteers in the settings section. You will have a single list of all volunteers, and another single list of all participants, but using the filters it shouldn't be that difficult for you to keep track of who is in the preschool section, and who is in the older segment. The biggest limitation of this approach is the schedule. The system will only generate a single schedule that all the participants rotate through. It does not support having either multiple schedules or having groups that don't rotate with the rest.

The other option is to set up two events. If you click the "MyAnswers Director" logo at the top right, you'll be taken to your events page, where you can create a separate event. This would allow you to manage your preschool and school aged groups completely separately. It would complicate online registration, as you would have two public pages.

We also do a separate pre school program. Along those lines, what would be really useful is a separate rotation schedule. We have the 3 main rotations for the older kids but because of attention spans and trying to keep class sizes to a reasonable amount we will be adding rotations for the "littles". But these rotations run separately from the others.

Thanks for the input. We're looking into how we can add more flexibility to the recommended schedule. At a minimum, we'll be adding the ability to exclude age groups from the main rotation schedule in a future update.

We also run a completely separate PreK program including the opening and closing. Having a separate public page to sign up would be extremely confusing for parents registering their children. Is it possible to allow us to add items to the rotation schedule, but then select the specific rotations for each group instead of them automatically being added to every group?

We're discussing options for dealing with this situation. I have passed your feedback along. At least in the short term, it is unlikely that we will be able to support multiple schedules for a single event.

Another possible workaround for now would be to create a second event only for preK scheduling. Everyone, both PreK and older, would be registered and managed on your main event. The second PreK event would never have students or volunteers, and it's public page would never be made live. You can just enter the event details, and set up your age groups, rotations, and teams on the second event. That would allow you to generate a recommended schedule and print out the various versions of it.

We also use a seperate schedule for preschool ages 2 through PreK-5 because they are in a separate building and use different rotation schedule and rooms. It would be immensely helpful to be able to have a seperate schedule for preschool. A seperate registration for preschool and for elementary would be confusing for families.

The upcoming release of Digital Director will allow you to exclude teams from the main rotation schedule. So that will help.

Our team is still evaluating what we can do for Churches who would like multiple rotation schedules. I've passed your comments on to the team.

Brad, I'm not sure that will help our main issue. The problem is with being able to change the schedule since we need to add activities to the schedule for the PreK program. Once an activity is added it effects the schedule for everyone. Our best option would be a flexible schedule - the ability to choose which activities go on a particular groups schedule.