WebJunction

I have often thought of doing the same thing - charge $5 upfront and if they attend and come to the last class they get their money back. We have also had a full class sign up and only 4-5 show up, when we turned other people away till the next month.

Bobbie

I volunteer as an instructor for the computer classes for ESL students at our library. I don't have any administrative authority to make this kind of decision, but I'm interested in the experiences of others.

I taught a class two nights ago that was near to full capacity --9 out of 10 seats filled. Only one of those students had actually registered. And 8 of the 9 people on the registration list did not show up. Pretty topsy-turvy!

I think there is a reluctance in our program to charge anything due to level of poverty of our patrons. I'm beginning to wonder about the value of pre-registering at all. Maybe we should just advertise that it's on a drop-in basis. Somehow, it seems less frustrating to have nobody drop in than to have a list of registered students not show up.

Hi there, I just came across this post and wanted to say that we have been doing a $5. deposit fee for all of our classes now for the past 2 yrs. I only am able to teach a class of 4 people at a time, do to limited space and we had a lot of registries not show up. So now we have a system that we use to register the patron online, then the patron has 48 hours to bring, mail, etc payment to us. If they are not paid by the 48 hrs mark the system deletes the user from the class roster and opens up for another student to register. When the student pays the deposit, we give them a receipt with the date and time of the class and they are informed that they must bring that receipt with them to class in order to get their deposit back. The day of the class the student shows up and before I begin the class they will give me their receipt and I will give them their $5 deposit back. If a student pays and does not show up for class the $5 is taken and entered into our register as a $5. donation. We have posted disclaimers and info about it in, out and every publication that is dealing with a class, so we don't run into any problems. Now if a patron calls 26 hours before a class is schedule to cancel their attendance, we will reimburse their fee, but they have 48 hours to pick it up. If they do not pick it up in that time factor It again will be set as a donation. If their is a emergency or something has come up unexpectedly for the student, occasionally we will reimburse or put the deposit towards another class. We usually don't have issues of students having emergencies other than the weather factor here in ohio, from keeping them from attending the class. We do however have a few students that register, and even though we may call to remind them of the class they do not show up. Now we originally started this for use of my computer classes, but now have started to use it for any program that we may have a registration or a set number of students seats open. We thought it would cause a lot of negative feedback and work for us when we started it but were surprised that it is working really well for us. You can check out our registration page etc if you go to our webpage http://www.kinsmanlibrary.org and then click on calendar and an event.

Good luck with your classes. ....D