Every year its a struggle to get all the students to fill out the waivers , consent forms and paperwork.
Recently at an event, I filled out a waiver online using smartwaiver. ( https://www.smartwaiver.com )
It was easy and quick.
From a brief google search, there are many electronic waiver systems.
Problem with FIRST Consent form system:
Students fill out waiver but parents never approve by email.
Email gets lost in spam filter
parents don’t check email often.
Students enter the wrong email address for their parents
Solution, make a all electronic version that students and parents fill out together in one sitting (no emails)
Agreed. I feel your pain. We never seem to get them all, and students, parent, and I all are clueless as to why one isn’t marked complete, because “oh, what e-mail” ?
And then there’s the one that still tries to bring me the paper form…
I have a similar rule. You don’t get it done, you can’t go to competition with the team.
It consumes a lot of my energy to herd the sheep to do what is needed. Talk about reducing mentors burnout. How about making things like this easier?
Every year I have to deal with at least one kid who put in a fake birth date which makes them over 18 years old and so his parent would not get the email notification to consent.
We had problems a few years ago with kids putting fake email addresses in the parent email address and then logging in to approve themselves. We make it abundantly clear that any type of subterfuge is grounds for immediate dismissal from the team, no exceptions.
I agree that the current system is rather cumbersome, with the multiple steps required to complete the form. As such, we do things the old fashioned way, and submit paper copies of our consent forms. The students already have to do paper copies of the school consent and insurance forms; adding the FIRST consent form to the package that their parents already have to sign doesn’t add any additional inconvenience. As long as FIRST gives us an option to do paper copies of these forms, we’ll be forgoing their online system.
We actually appreciate the tediousness of the consent forms for this reason. We only want those who are serious about the competition to be there, so if they do not put in the time and effort to get the form filled out correctly, they cannot represent the team at competitions. It helps weed out those who truly want to compete, and those who just want to miss a few days of school.
I took the time to complete a How-To document for New and Returning students, with screenshots and including shots of what the emails will look like. Last year was our first year getting 100% compliance with students signing up and 100% of the parents completing the consent form.
Would you share with the community? It will help me a lot. I spend a lot of time and effort to explain how to do it, ask them to do it, remind them to do it, tell them parents need to do it too, remind them to do it, tell some they did it wrong, remind them to do it, explain the consequence for not doing it, email parents to ask them to do it, remind students to remind their parents to do it, threathen them again with the consequence, plead with them to do it, and after about 4 months, I finally get 100% of them. This process repeats the next year. Heck, the build season is shorter than this.
Our team, for the most part, does it this way as well. With fewer than 20 students (hopefully to change this year), it’s not quite so burdensome to keep a log of which forms were completed by which student on which date. Since half of our forms must be filled out in a paper format, it just makes sense for everything to be paper.
Of course, we email the students and parents a bulk PDF with all of the forms in it about once per week during build season. This is (of course) a blatantly transparent attempt to get them to use their paper rather than mine .
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