TAKING CONTROL OF A COMPLEX ADMISSIONS ENVIRONMENT

There is no such thing as a quiet season at Wyoming Seminary. Affectionately known as “Sem,” the school was founded in 1844. It is the oldest coeducational independent college preparatory school in Northeastern Pennsylvania. Wyoming Seminary maintains two separate campuses, Lower School and Upper School, in the historic Wyoming Valley.

During the regular school year, more than 700 students gather from local communities, 13 other states and the District of Columbia, and 23 other countries to meet engaging, individualized academic challenges and stretch themselves in a broad range of activities in athletics and the performing and fine arts. When classes break for the summer, the campus welcomes another 500 students. The summer population includes some students who are already part of the Sem community, and some who come from other lands to immerse themselves in American culture and English language as a way to prepare for a boarding school experience. Others want to focus on building academic skills. The majority come for art and music and theater, seizing the opportunity to deepen their skills and work with some of the most inspiring artists and coaches in the world.

Jack Eidam has been responsible for shaping the student body at Sem since he began in the Admissions office in 1969. Today, he directs Admissions and Financial Aid—and he also directs the Summer Program, which comprises three separate Institutes.

“Admissions has changed a lot in 40 years,” Eidam reflects. “I remember running this office with an IBM selectric typewriter and onion skin paper. Then we moved up to a Displaywriter, which printed out on huge green and white papers. I’ve gone through four or five generations of databases and word processor stages along the way.”

Independent school admissions has changed, too.

“Since the 1990s, schools like ours have had to look for new markets. We haven’t gone to more distant territories; we’ve had to move more in the direction of niche markets. We have expanded the market for the Lower School, as there is no independent school competitor. Families do have other options in Upper School, so we build upon Sem’s particular strengths: the performing arts program is extraordinary, and now the visual arts have gained a foothold. The wrestling program is extraordinary, and girls field hockey is in the national limelight. Football has always been strong. This is in addition to our rigorous college preparatory academic program.

“Sem is a very complex institution,” Eidam explains.

The timing of this work all overlaps. How large is the Eidam’s staff?

“Gigantic,” he confesses. He is quick to explain the need: “This office is a school within a school.”

The Wyoming Seminary Admissions Office manages admissions and financial aid for 800 students in 15 grades on two campuses. For the Summer Program, they manage all the hiring, billing, and scheduling for three Institutes, and admissions for 500 places. And more, Eidam explains: “My responsibility is the overall overseer; we have faculty members who direct the individual programs: ESL and College Prep and the Performing Arts Institute. Our staff does all the catalog design and publications and marketing and promo schemes.”

The Lower School has two admissions professionals with no support staff. The Upper School has an admissions staff of six professionals and five support staff.

“These support staff function at such a high level, they really perform as administrators,” Eidam offered, a glimpse into his management style.  “We have an extremely competent staff.”

The decision to move to PORTAL by inRESONANCE was driven by the growing sophistication of Sem’s evolving technology and marketing strategies. “Our needs in terms of an Admissions database and its communication capabilities are complex as well,” he explained.

“The lower school admissions office, enrolling small children, is working mostly with parents. In the upper school, we are working with adolescents, communicating with them. We have day students and boarding students, who come from all over the world.

“Sem has outstanding music, sports, and of course academics—and the database has to help us communicate about all of our programs.

“We went with iR because it was a system that was adaptable. iR helped us rewrite a comprehensive program to manage the Summer School, and they helped us to integrate it with PORTAL.

“PORTAL is flexible, adaptable. It allows us to do what we want to do. It is as complex as we are. It has taken time for our staff to learn the intricacies in order to input and extract data. Some of our people can move into layout mode, to adapt PORTAL even further.

“It has taken our fairly large office two or three years to learn how to adapt PORTAL to our own needs, instead of our having to adapt to PORTAL, as we did in the beginning. One of the reasons I love working with this staff is they are always eager to learn something new. My goal is that each member of the staff will develop the skill to design his or her own reports, and then feel empowered to use those proficiencies. I like to design my own reports. I like to get the data out in a way that we can see, and I like to massage it, to ask my own questions.

“For instance, I wanted to have a less complicated report than the one PORTAL had, to tell me how many inquiries we are having at precise points in time, for each specific admissions group, and also a simple report for applications. The reports are popping out now. We look at our admissions as having four different subsets to track. We look to see a comparison between the present and the same date, each of the last two years, for inquiries and applications:
   

“It’s very simple to get these reports now. We run them every two weeks.”

Eidam personifies the ideal educational trajectory of the iR client: he has taken ownership of his own data and is learning to pull the reports that will help him be even more effective. For now, he hands the most challenging questions to a more experienced, in-house FileMaker developer.

“I am looking ahead to the next round of customized reports; they will be a bit more complicated. I want a report showing: accepted decisions, new enrollments, and re-enrollments in each of the above sub-sets. Craig Cirelli, Associate Director of Academic Technology, is our primary writer of complicated reports. Once he gets the templates in place, we will adjust the layouts ourselves.”

This writer had met Cirelli at a recent conference at iR for FileMaker developers who wanted to collaborate on some open source projects for schools. I reached out to him for more detail about the types of customizations Eidam required. “Jack Eidam doesn’t give himself enough credit,” Cirelli remarked. “Most of our customizations have been smart letters with calculations. Jack puts all the parts in a pile for me, and I compile them. He has already done all the thinking.”

Cirelli is investing time in incorporating Powerschool into Sem’s administrative mix. “The faculty loves the Powerschool interface,” he shared, “but the administrative interface has been a challenge. Moving forward, I will build a front end in FileMaker to pull the data out for reports. I’d like to make a semi-automated shell in FileMaker, as that is where our comfort is.” FileMaker’s new ESS feature allows a developer to live connect and pull data directly from more traditional systems that use Oracle or SQL.

Eidam summarized the value of PORTAL: “I am grateful that we have iR in place and that it is so adaptable. I feel lucky that we do have a FileMaker developer in-house, upon whom we can call for complex customizations. We are gradually getting to the point in the office where PORTAL is doing what we want it to do, and we know how to control it. I can foresee that we will eventually replace all of the canned reports in PORTAL with customized reports of our own making.

“Customized reports are so important to us. I imagine any of your new clients would benefit from having iR review the whole collection of their existing reports, and project how difficult it would be to reformat them for the new platform. All schools look at data a bit differently; it would be unrealistic to think that iR could include a library of reports that is going to adapt to a complex school like ours. From our own experience, it seems to me that a client would benefit to have someone with incredible skill at iR create some of the fundamental reports for them. We did that at the outset. Three years later, we are much more independent.”

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