Precious Children in the Highlands Preschool needed a smarter way to track enrollment, manage classroom capacity and keep pace with the complexity of part-time scheduling across multiple classrooms. With Procare’s AI-powered enrollment planning tool RoomRunner, preschool administrator Samantha Skinner gained real-time enrollment visibility, automated room transitions and minimized compliance risks with built-in capacity alerts – all while ensuring that every seat is filled, capturing important revenue for her non-profit center.
Precious Children in the Highlands Preschool is a faith-based preschool based in Lakeland, Florida. The school serves children from 6 weeks through elementary school.
The Challenge
Precious Children in the Highlands (PCH) Preschool faced a challenge that many child care centers know well: the spreadsheet problem. Samantha and her team tracked enrollment, room assignments and waitlists manually using spreadsheets, a system that required constant manual updates and left room for missed opportunities – and missed revenue.
Enrollment complexities ran deep. Children transitioned between classrooms based on developmental needs and parent requests, not just age. Accounting for part-time enrollment presented another challenge, as a single scheduling mix-up could lead to an over-capacity classroom or a missed invoice. Without any way of being notified, errors could go undetected for days.
Every unfilled spot for a non-profit like PCH Preschool is a direct hit to the budget. Before RoomRunner, gaps in the schedule were easy to overlook.
“Sometimes we’ll miss out on those gaps,” said Samantha. “Sometimes it could be 20% that we’ve missed. That’s still revenue that’s needed every day.”
PCH Preschool faced these challenges with their existing enrollment process:
- No real-time visibility: Staff had no instant way to confirm a room’s capacity, making it difficult to answer families asking when they can start.
- Error-prone manual scheduling: Spreadsheets have no way of flagging capacity risks for further analysis, making it difficult to address issues proactively.
- Missed revenue from enrollment gaps: Without a centralized view of occupancy, open spots and part-time enrollees were easy to miss, leading to incorrect billing and empty seats
The Solution
PCH Preschool joined RoomRunner’s beta program ready for a smarter way to manage enrollment planning. From the start, Samantha and the Procare team worked together to customize the tool so it suggested likely moves while giving them the flexibility to move children for reasons beyond age.
RoomRunner replaced spreadsheets with a centralized enrollment management tool that gave Samantha a single, reliable view of every classroom. Automated room transitions also meant that staff could more easily move children between rooms, scheduling transitions months in advance without needing to find how to manually reassign them.
This approach allowed them to:
- See capacity at a glance: A live dashboard shows current enrollment and openings in every room, giving Samantha instant answers to capacity questions.
- Catch compliance issues early: Built-in capacity alerts flag scheduling conflicts in real time, allowing scheduling errors to be fixed before they become a problem.
- Plan ahead with future views: Enrollment projections extend months into the future to identify upcoming openings, schedule room transitions and fill seats before they’re ever empty.
It just makes sense to have in any facility.
SAMANTHA SKINNER, PRESCHOOL ADMINISTRATOR AT PRECIOUS CHILDREN IN THE HIGHLANDS PRESCHOOL
Source: Customer Interview
The Results
RoomRunner has transformed how PCH Preschool manages enrollment, and the results have been instantaneous. In just two months of use, RoomRunner surfaced six compliance issues that might not have been caught using spreadsheets. One of those alerts also uncovered a billing error, protecting revenue that otherwise would have been lose.
The centralized capacity dashboard has become one of Samantha’s go-to tools. When a licensing agent unexpectedly arrived and asked how many children were enrolled, the answer was quick and easy to find. When a parent pushed back on the soonest date they could enroll, Samantha could give a specific answer in seconds. When a family on the waitlist called for an update, she could respond with an exact date without putting them on hold.
For a non-profit where every open spot means missed revenue, that visibility matters. RoomRunner’s enrollment view surfaces upcoming transitions and openings so that an empty seat is identified well in advance, capturing the 20% of enrollment gaps that Samantha estimates they missed before.
During the busy back-to-school time in August, when PCH Preschool transitions most of their students, Samantha expects RoomRunner to save her three hours on manually updating classroom assignments. That time goes back to the work that matters most – setting children and their families up for a successful year.
Learn How Procare Can Help Your Child Care Center!
Precious Children in the Highlands Preschool’s experience with RoomRunner demonstrates what’s possible when enrollment goes from reactive to proactive. By replacing manual spreadsheets with automated transitions, live capacity tracking and built-in compliance alerts, Procare helps child care centers protect their revenue, reduce administrative burden and stay confident in their enrollment every step of the way.
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