Greetings!
Council is over and it is time to shift gears to the Spring. PYM Senior High Weekend at Shrine Mont is coming up sooner than you think and registrations will be available on February 15th. But before we do that, it has come to our attention that a specific difficulty in the registration process is creating some confusion when youth leaders try to confirm participants registered.
Every year each weekend event attracts around 150 people from parishes all over the diocese. To sign up a parent/guardian fills out the registration form and submits it to our office with tuition. We in turn respond to that parent/guardian with a confirmation. So far, so good.
Each youth participant MUST be accompanied by an adult and in most cases that parish’s youth leader, either volunteer or full time (Note: the name of the youth’s chaperone is required on the form). As youth leaders register their youth, there currently isn’t a way to see which parents have registered youth and taken all the necessary steps, save for actually calling us and asking who has done what. We have two proposed solutions to try and fix this issue:
1. We produce a “Google doc” which would provide a link to a list of everyone registered for each event. It would be a “read only” document for everyone except diocesan staff. The youth leader and parent/guardian could check the registration and chaperone status of their group. For privacy’s sake, the Google Doc would show only part of a youth’s name and church and nothing else, e.g. “Michael W – St. Thomas, Richmond”.
2. We allow one person from each group to register youth. Youth leaders would be responsible to track down each registration, making sure all the members of their group are registered. Please note that the coordinator role would need to be fill be someone in the parish, even in congregations where is no designated youth leader.
Please take the time to write us an email or post a response here. We would really like your feedback on this issue and want to do whatever we can to make it as simple as possible to register for our great events.
