Printer Friendly Version - A Welcoming Place to Start

Sarah Koster is new to East Haven, but after just eight months, she’s already providing new East Haven families with an easier way to enroll their children in school. Photo by Nathan Hughart/The Courier

Just eight months into her job as secretary for the Board of Education (BOE), Sarah Koster is helping out new residents get a foothold in town.

“I’ve never worked in a school district before, so I’m completely new in so many ways,” Sarah says. “Coming from my previous role as a secretary for an attorney, there’s a lot of things that I was able to bring with me. That is sort of being a face for the district.”

Stationed at the BOE’s central office in the high school building, Sarah is tasked with helping visitors find what they need.

One thing that hasn’t changed from when she worked at a law office is her support role.

“People are coming to you, sometimes they just need you to listen,” she says. “Also, a lot of times, they’re looking for help and that help is different in a law office...but I learned to be a support for them however they need it.”

As someone who is new to East Haven herself, Sarah says she wants to pass on the welcoming feeling she was given when she first came to work in the office. Still, the job presented a challenge at first.

“People call here constantly. People walk in every day not exactly sure where to go,” she says. “They’re new to town, they don’t know anything about East Haven, they need to enroll their children, [and] they don’t know what school.”

Sarah grew up near New London, but spent some time traveling around northern New England. She studied graphic design at Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont.

“I’m not in a position where I do graphic design daily, but...I jumped into this role at a time when there were some big changes to central office as far as registering students,” Sarah says.

This past summer, school registrations for elementary grades switched from the schools themselves to the central office. Sarah’s graphic design background came in handy when it came to standardizing and re-creating registration forms.

“I redid all the forms that we use because previous to this year, every school...had these different forms. Nothing was unified,” she says. “I collected everything that everyone used and made it very uniform.”

Plus, there are more changes coming. The district is currently moving all elementary registration online. Sarah is helping to get it up and running.

“That’s something that East Haven has not done in the past is online registration,” she says. “It’s a big, big step.”

The BOE’s Technology Department took the initial steps of building the platform, but Sarah has taken on the role of fine-tuning it.

“Because I’ve been in the role, I can see, you know, we need to make these changes in order to make it most friendly for the parents,” Sarah says.

The new registration process will link directly to PowerSchool, a system used by the district to keep students and families up to date with grades and other information.

“It will help people like myself who do registrations...in that we won’t have to manually put in each student into PowerSchool now,” Sarah says.

Eventually, Sarah says, registration for the middle school and high school will be migrated to the Internet, but the priority is to get online registration up and running for the wave of Kindergarten registrations in February and March.

New elementary students can be registered online from the district’s website at www.east-haven.k12.ct.us starting Friday, Feb. 22.

“People register all year long,” Sarah says. “I probably registered about 10 people this week. If you’re moving here in the middle of the school year, it’s ongoing.”

Sarah is looking forward to using the new system herself to make the registration process easier. She says that though registration is moving online, parents are still welcome to visit the central office for assistance using the new system.

“I think it will be easier for the families,” she says. “They’ll be able to go through this process in their own homes or we have a computer [in the office] that they’re welcome to use.”

The new online process will cut down on paperwork and make the district more organized than ever, but Sarah doesn’t plan on changing the support she can offer families in East Haven.

“Whether you’re coming to a new town and you don’t know anyone or you’re seeking legal advice...you want to be dealing with someone who is friendly, supportive and can help you however they can,” she says.