Due to overall complexity of this upgrade, you may experience occasional service interruption of some parts of the website. This upgrade may last until the end of 2019.
Every school account in PushCoin is undergoing a transition to the new, multi-coupon system where a student may have one or more coupons assigned at any time. Below we are describing the steps and criteria for determining how we will transition your account. Please reach out to us if you have any concerns or questions.
To start, we have identified two categories of school districts by the way they assign coupons to students…
Category one: districts that combined food with fee waivers.
In those districts, we observe at most two coupons today: Free and/or Reduced. Students with the Free coupon receive free meals and have their fees waived. Students with the Reduced coupon receive reduced-price meals and have reduced-or-waived fees. After the transition to the multi-coupon model, these schools will feature a slightly more verbose but more flexible setup of coupons per school year:
- Fees – waived
- Fees – reduced
- Food – free
- Food – reduced
Above you can see the separation of fee wavers from the food status. This is necessary to support different dates of expiration. In general, a fee waiver expires in the same school year that it was assigned, whereas the food status expires 30-school-days of the following school year. If your school does not expire food and fee-waiver on different dates, you can combine them for simplicity. In that case, you would see these already familiar to you coupons per school year:
- Free
- Reduced
Notice how in all examples so far we said “per school year”. This was intentional. From now on the system will require that you create a new set of coupons per school year. This means that you may see current-year and next-year coupons in the system. For example:
- 19/20 Fees – waived
- 19/20 Fees – reduced
- 19/20 Food – free
- 19/20 Food – reduced
- 20/21 Fees – waived
- 20/21 Fees – reduced
- 20/21 Food – free
- 20/21 Food – reduced
- etc.
Tagging coupons with a school year gives you the flexibility of assigning the coupons – i.e. approving the applications – before the school year ends or the next one starts. For example, you may have students who are already approved for the 20/21 food and fee waiver and students who are still on the 19/20 food and fee waiver, i.e. the 30 day extension is in effect.
Category two: districts that separately manage fee wavers from food benefits.
Here, the districts approve student’s food status separately from the fee waiver. The statuses can have different expiration dates too. Going forward, you will use a coupon to convey the food status and another coupon to convey the fee status. Similarly to category-one district, you will create a set of coupons per school year. This also means that the following coupons will no longer exist: Ffood_Rfee, Fee_Redcd, Food_Redcd, Redc_Waive, etc. This is surely a good news as they were difficult to read and manage in the first place.
We will begin transitioning your students to the appropriate two-coupon statuses. For example, a student with Ffood_Rfee will have two coupons: 19/20 Food – free and 19/20 Fees – reduced.
More questions?
If you would like more clarity or have questions regarding this upgrade, please contact PushCoin support.