Free Admissions Management for K-12 Schools, Inquiry to Enrollment

The openeducat_admission module is released under LGPLv3 and is free to download, install, modify, and run. There is no per-applicant fee, no per-seat licence, no annual subscription on the core module. Your only running cost is the infrastructure you host it on, typically a $10-30/month VPS for a single K-12 school of a few hundred applicants per cycle. Optional paid add-ons exist (advanced analytics, premium support), but they are never required to operate the admissions pipeline.

OpenEduCat is a Python and PostgreSQL application that runs on a Linux server. For a typical K-12 school running one admissions cycle a year with a few hundred applicants and family logins concentrated in a 4-6 week window, a $10-30/month VPS from a provider like Hetzner, DigitalOcean, or AWS Lightsail is sufficient. The admissions office needs either an internal IT lead, a managed-hosting partner, or a few hours a month of contracted DevOps to handle backups, updates, and SSL. There is no SaaS dashboard to log into and forget about, you are operating real infrastructure, and that trade-off is the price of zero licence fees.

Ravenna, SchoolMint, AdmissionsPlus, and Finalsite Enrollment are mature SaaS products with polished parent UX, managed hosting, and dedicated support, and they price accordingly, typically several thousand to tens of thousands of dollars per year for a single K-12 school. OpenEduCat trades some of that SaaS polish for full source-code ownership, no per-applicant fees, and the ability to customise the form, pipeline stages, and reports without filing a vendor change request. Schools that already run technology in-house, or that need the admissions data to live in the same database as the SIS, gradebook, and fee module, often pick OpenEduCat. Schools that want a fully managed experience and are willing to pay for it usually prefer one of the proprietary platforms. Both choices are legitimate, and we recommend evaluating against your IT capacity, not just price.

Yes. The application form captures whether the applicant has siblings already enrolled, and the pipeline can tag and surface those applications for priority review according to your written admissions policy. You can build the same flagging for staff-children, alumni-children, feeder-school applicants, or any priority category your board has approved. The system enforces visibility and review order, the actual admission decision remains with your admissions committee, and the decision rationale is logged on the applicant record for fairness audits.

Applicants who are strong but cannot be offered a seat in the first round move to a waitlist with a configurable ranking. When an offered family declines, or when the school adds capacity, the next-ranked waitlisted applicant is surfaced for the admissions director to release an offer to. Parents on the waitlist can be sent automated status updates so they are not left wondering, which materially reduces the volume of phone calls the office handles in July and August.

Every status change, every document verification, every interview note, and every offer or rejection is logged with timestamp and user. This is important for school admissions where boards, accreditors, and in some jurisdictions regulators expect a defensible audit trail. Our admissions workflow is designed to satisfy widely-recognised admissions-fairness frameworks, including NAIS Principles of Good Practice for Admission and, for schools operating in England and Wales, the statutory School Admissions Code published by the Department for Education. Your admissions committee still makes the calls, the system gives you the record.