Solving The Puzzle

Irregular Fee Collection

APSs are the heroes in every community, making quality English-based education accessible to children from low-income populations. In their endeavours to foster equitable education, they are faced with an obvious challenge – untimely fee payments by financially burdened parents. This situation is faced by many schools and Pratham High School is one of them.

The school administrator of the school, Mr. Goyel observed that most parents are either skipping a month’s fees and paying an accumulated sum later or just keep repeating a late payment cycle. Whatever the case, this created a ripple effect as the school could not gather the estimated revenue required for paying the teachers, purchasing basic supplies, sustaining electricity and other infrastructural amenities, and imparting quality education.

This situation was equally stressful for the school administrator as it was for the school owner. So, it was necessary to facilitate consistent and regular fee payments by providing a strategic and convenient solution to parents.

To address the financial instability issue caused by delayed fee payments, Goyel decided to use the SEYMO School App, which offers a host of features including automated fee collection. He provided training to the accountant staff and parents on how to use the app.

SEYMO’s integrated online payment system allowed parents to pay fees easily through any of the digital methods i.e., credit/debit cards, bank transfers, and eWallets. The app even sent automated reminders to parents every month about upcoming due dates, reducing any chances of missed payments. With automated reminders and convenient digital payment options, parents began making payments on time and more consistently. This augmented the school’s cash flow and ensured that sufficient funds were available for teachers’ salaries, supplies, and infrastructure.

By using the SEYMO School App, Pratham High School was able to overcome its fee collection hurdles brilliantly. The automation of fee collection streamlined financial management which resulted in a more stable income flow and efficient operations of the school. This success story is a testimony of how modern technology can address prevailing challenges faced by low-cost schools and help them effortlessly pursue their mission of delivering quality education.

Lack of Parent-School Communication

At Garden High Academy, regular communication between parents and the school was an evident challenge. Since it operates on a tight budget, it has limited staff and minimal tools or resources for communication. This subsequently resulted in a series of problems for parents such as missed academic updates, unawareness about student’s grades, unaddressed behavioural issues, and missed alerts on emergencies like school closure due to weather.

Realizing the gap in communication between the school and parents, Mr. Ali Zefar, a dedicated teacher looked for effective means to bridge the gap. In the era of messaging applications, he could only think about an app solution that would dedicatedly help parents to communicate with school and vice-versa.

Seymo, a specific app for schools is the best solution Zefar had known. He learnt about its features like SMS reminders, notifications on events, alerts for payments, and logs of interactions with parents. When he introduced his school owner and other teachers to Seymo, he got an instant nod of approval for them for its interactive features. Everyone agreed on how the app could help them overcome the evident challenges they face in conveying students’ reports, behaviour issues, event announcements, PTM dates, etc. to parents every time.

With Seymo at their end, both parents and teachers got an excellent way to communicate with each other about the children’s academic aspects. This, in a way, provided a formal and efficient way to keep parents informed, engaged, and involved in their children’s education. As a whole, it resulted in a more collaborative environment that contributed to student’s success.

To say the least, Seymo emerged as a remarkable sidekick in many such schools’ efforts to enhance communication. By providing means for direct interactions, the app helped them overcome the rampant issue of communication gap between them. This ultimately resulted in the evolution of a more connected and supportive educational scenario, leading to better learning outcomes and a brighter future for students.

Improper Attendance Tracking

At Maple Star School, an APS with a diverse student base faced difficulty in accurate attendance tracking. With an age-old manual record-keeping system, the school struggled to keep track of student attendance effectively.

The class teachers do not have a standardized system for tracking attendance and they manually record the students’ presence on attendance registers, leading to discrepancies or errors. This made it difficult to monitor and address issues of chronic absenteeism or punctuality issues in students. The worst case scenario happened when a higher secondary student bunked a class but the teacher failed to log in as someone gave a proxy of his attendance. The authenticity of attendance records was also in question!

The repetition of such attendance-related issues and teachers failing to manually keep track of a huge number of students became a severe concern. Additionally, the school found it challenging to identify the underlying causes of students with frequent absences or lateness, i.e., whether there are health-related, family issues, or disengagement.

The lack of a proper attendance management system created an administrative burden for each of the class teachers and the head teacher. They and the administrative staff spent a considerable amount of time managing attendance records manually.

To tackle these problems, Mr. Patel, the school management officer at Maple Star School, proposed the integration of the Seymo app. He recognized the need for a more efficient solution and mentioned how Seymo’s appearance tracking features will streamline attendance marking and overall student management. It necessitates the school to log a student’s attendance on the app! The app automatically sends real-time notifications to parents if their child was marked absent or late.

This real-time communication ensured that parents were promptly informed and could address any issues or concerns regarding their child’s attendance. Seymo even provided analytical tools to track and analyze attendance patterns. This feature enabled the school to identify issues such as frequent absences or late arrivals, helping the administration to take proactive measures for addressing them and supporting the concerned students.

With Seymo, school administrators can also easily login and manage attendance records, quickly generate reports and summaries, and use the data to give awards (for maximum attendance and punctuality). By enabling accurate and efficient attendance management, Seymo contributed to a more organized and responsive educational environment for students.