VIDEO: Register For The New School Year

CHOCTAW COUNTY, Miss. (WCBI)-The new school year is right around the corner.

For parents, the new school year means registering your child for school, while filling out what seems to be an endless and overwhelming amount of paperwork.

Educators know registering for school can be time-consuming.

Emergency contact information, immunization documents, and paying fees all must be done.

However, the Choctaw County School District is taking a different approach to make registering easier for parents.

“Parent’s they’ve got their education, but every year after the first day of school all of the forms come come,” said Glen Beard, Choctaw County School Superintendent. “The emergency contact and stuff like that, so they feel like they’re going back to school having to fill out all of that paperwork.”

To help parents, the district offers online registration for parents.

“It’s a time saver,” Beard said. “You can print forms out online and type in there online. For those that have multiple kids like I do, I have four kids, you’ll still have to fill out the forms for every student, but when you have to do it online, you can print all four out at one time.”

The district has also cut down on the number of forms parents have to complete.

“A lot of those forms were asking for the same thing, so we just kind of made it to where it can be simplified and use parts of the forms for other uses,”said Beard.

Parents also have to plan out what their kids will take to school. Kim Tullos recently registered her son for kindergarten.

“The supply list is normally long, like last year, but this year they don’t have a long list, there’s only four things on the kindergarten list,”said Beard.

Beard said educators cut back on school supply lists so parents wouldn’t have to drain their pocketbooks. This means parents are spending about $20, instead of nearly $70 as in years past.

“We ask the parents to still buy back packs, the non-rolling kind, nap mats for your kindergartners or pre-kindergartners, the blue and red nap mats. We cut the supply lost down to where they just buy a pack of pencils, and a pack of loose-leaf paper,” he said.

Beard said schools still require certain fees to be paid, but those prices have also been reduced.

“I think we have a choir fee, maybe a science lab fee, it’s very few,” he said. “Most of those are apart of extra circulars like the choir, so I think that’s the highest fee we have, the rest of them are relatively small.”
Beard said there is not a set registration date for students, but he prefers parents register their kids before the beginning of the school year.