Celebrating 13 Years of SchoolMint

Thirteen years ago, SchoolMint started with a very personal problem.

My wife, Forum Desai, and I were trying to enroll our own child in school, and the experience was far more complicated than we expected. Finding the right options, understanding the process, completing applications, and knowing what would happen next all created unnecessary friction around what was already an important decision for our family.

As a parent, I remember thinking, “Why does this have to be so difficult?”

That question eventually became SchoolMint.

We believed technology could make enrollment easier and more transparent for families while giving schools better tools to manage the complicated work happening behind the scenes.

Thirteen years later, I still believe deeply in that mission. The difference today is that much of what surrounds that mission has changed.

The SchoolMint Story, 13 Years Later

When I think about SchoolMint’s story, I don’t think about it only in terms of products we have built or milestones we’ve reached. Instead, I think about the people who have shaped the company along the way:

• The employees who believed in the mission
• The educators who trusted us with some of their most important work
• The families whose experiences remind us why that work matters

We brought some of those voices together for our 13th anniversary.

The SchoolMint in that video is very different from the company we started in 2013. That is because the enrollment challenge facing K-12 is very different, too.

In 2013, the Enrollment Challenge Was Largely About the Process

When Forum and I founded SchoolMint, many schools were still managing critical enrollment work through paper forms, spreadsheets, emails, and in-person office visits.

• Families often had to complete the same information repeatedly.
• Applications could be difficult to access or understand.
• Even straightforward lottery processes were complicated to administer.
• Registration required stacks of paperwork and taking time off work to drop off forms.
• School staff spent hours and thousands of dollars on data entry, manual follow-up, and printing.

The problem SchoolMint initially set out to solve was relatively straightforward: how could we make the existing enrollment process easier for schools and families?

Moving applications and lotteries online was a big part of that. So was making enrollment accessible from a phone, automating enrollment communications, introducing multilingual forms, and giving administrators visibility into the process.

Those problems have not disappeared. In fact, many of them are still key reasons schools, charter organizations, and districts turn to SchoolMint today.

However, enrollment itself has become something much bigger than the process of submitting an application, running a lottery, or completing registration.

K-12 Has Entered a New Era of Enrollment

For many public school systems, enrollment historically functioned primarily as an administrative responsibility:

• Families lived within a community.
• Most attended their assigned neighborhood school.
• Enrollment teams managed the process of getting students enrolled.

Today, families have more options.

Depending on where they live, parents may be comparing neighborhood schools, charter schools, magnet and choice programs, neighboring districts through open enrollment, private schools, virtual programs, homeschooling, and specialized academic pathways. And they’re actively making those comparisons:

A National School Choice Awareness Foundation survey found that 72% of parents had considered a new school for their child, up from 52% in 2022.

At the same time, schools are competing for a shrinking population of students. The National Center for Education Statistics projects public school enrollment will decline from 49 million students in fall 2023 to 46.9 million by fall 2031.

Those two trends together have fundamentally changed enrollment.

Schools still have to make it easy for a family to apply. But increasingly, they also have to answer a question that was much less central 13 years ago: Why should this family choose us in the first place?

That changes where enrollment begins:

• It begins when a parent searches for schools online.
• It begins when they see an advertisement, hear about a program from another parent, visit a school website, attend an open house, or compare several schools.
• It continues when they raise their hand and ask for more information.

And it can be won or lost in what happens next: whether someone follows up, whether the family gets the information they need, whether the application is easy to complete, and whether the entire experience gives them confidence in the school they’re considering.

Enrollment has moved from something schools primarily process to something they increasingly have to earn (a mindset shift I wrote more about in my previous article, The Future of K-12 Enrollment Will Be Defined by Family Trust).

As Enrollment Changed, SchoolMint Had to Change With It

The enrollment challenges schools face today extend far beyond applications, lotteries, and registration, so SchoolMint had to grow beyond them too. Today, schools need to:

• Help families discover the right options
• Build awareness and generate interest
• Capture prospective family inquiries and follow up consistently
• Understand which recruitment efforts are actually producing enrolled students

They still need powerful application, lottery, registration, and re-enrollment technology, but those processes can no longer sit in isolation from everything that happens before them.

That evolution is why I now think of SchoolMint as an Enrollment Growth Platform.

Today, our goal is to connect what too often remains disconnected: school discovery, recruitment, family outreach, applications, lotteries, registration, communications, and reporting.

That’s not because schools need more technology for the sake of technology. Instead, it’s because families experience enrollment as one journey, even when a school’s internal systems treat it as six different ones. And when those pieces connect, schools can answer questions that have become increasingly important:

• Where are prospective families coming from?
• Which programs are generating interest?
• Did the family who attended an open house ever apply?
• Who accepted a seat but never finished registration?
• Which recruitment investments are actually contributing to enrollment?
• Where are families getting stuck?

Those weren’t the questions that led my wife and I to start SchoolMint 13 years ago. But today, they’re some of the most important enrollment questions our partners are asking.

What Hasn’t Changed

For all the ways SchoolMint and K-12 enrollment have evolved, the driving force of SchoolMint remains the same: Enrollment should be easy.

• It should be easy for a parent trying to understand the opportunities available to their child.
• It should be easy for a family to take the next step when they find a school that feels right.
• It should be easy for school staff to manage complex processes without spending their days fighting spreadsheets, paperwork, and disconnected systems.

Enrollment may involve more technology, data, and strategy than it did 13 years ago, but those are ultimately just the means. The outcome we’re working toward is still deeply human: helping more students reach the best-fit school where they can thrive.

Reflections on 13 Years of SchoolMint

When you start a company, it’s difficult to imagine what it will look like more than a decade later.

Today, more than 16,000 PreK-12 schools and organizations rely on SchoolMint. Over the years, SchoolMint has supported enrollment for more than 26.5 million students, processed more than 16 million applications, and completed more than 4.5 million registrations.

Those numbers are meaningful to me, but what they represent matters much more:

• Behind every application is a family making a decision about their child.
• Behind every lottery is a school trying to run an equitable, fair process families can trust.
• Behind every registration is a student getting closer to their first day.

Because where a child goes to school matters enormously: The right school can change the trajectory of a child’s entire life.

That’s why enrollment has never felt like an administrative process to me. At its core, it’s about connecting a child with a school that can change what comes next. And behind every one of those experiences are educators and enrollment teams doing incredibly complicated work, often with limited staff, limited time, and enormous responsibility.

SchoolMint’s Story Has Always Been Shaped by Our Partners and Our People

K-12 enrollment is incredibly complex. No two districts operate the same way. Charter schools face different pressures than large districts. Magnet programs have different requirements than neighborhood schools. Communities have different policies, languages, demographics, and family needs.

Our customers have continually challenged us to understand those realities and build for them. They’ve brought us complicated lottery rules, new school models, unique workflows, changing policies, recruitment challenges, and problems I never anticipated 13 years ago.

SchoolMint is a better company because they did.

The same is true of the people who have worked here. Over 13 years, hundreds of talented people have brought their ideas, expertise, creativity, persistence, and care to this mission. They have built technology, supported customers through high-pressure enrollment seasons, launched campaigns, solved difficult problems, listened to feedback, and found ways to make SchoolMint better.

No founder builds a 13-year company alone, and SchoolMint exists today because a lot of people decided this work was worth doing.

The Next Chapter

I don’t know what K-12 enrollment will look like 13 years from now. Family expectations will continue to change, school choice will continue to evolve, demographic shifts will create new pressures, and technology will make things possible that we’re only beginning to imagine. SchoolMint will continue to change with those realities, just as we have since 2013.

To our customers, our employees, our partners, and everyone who has been part of SchoolMint’s story over the past 13 years: thank you.

I’m incredibly proud of how much SchoolMint has changed, but I’m even more proud that the reason we started hasn’t: to make one of the most important decisions a family makes easier, so more children can find the school where they can thrive.