Get Ready for 16-17!

Hello Everybody!

We hope you are having an excellent summer! Things at ABC have been incredibly busy as we get ready for the coming school year. This is a large and important update about:

Registration Alert
New Teachers (and old)
Schedule alert due to teacher switches
New Software for Booking & Billing
Important dates

Please read this carefully so you are ready to get your school year started smoothly.

Not Registered Yet? Beat the Back-to-School Madness Now!

While most of our students were re-registered for the Fall, we are still missing a number of you.

If your schedule is important to you, and you want to be sure that lessons fit your needs, please call us straight away so we can get you the most convenient possible time.

The closer we get to September, the less able we are to offer you the best times – people are already calling for bookings, and we are also actively advertising for new students.

Hello, Goodbye

One of the exciting things we do is to pick teachers that shine above and beyond their qualifications, with a vitality that is actually unlikely to keep them at ABC forever. This is OK with us, because it means they are always excited about their musical projects, and music in general, which we feel gets transferred to everything they do, including your lessons!

This year we say goodbye to the following excellent teachers…

Étienne Lévesque
Asha Pieper
Heather Macdonald
Juan Arce
Bobby Hsu
Andrea Naccarato
Hannah Greiner

…and welcome these fun new team members!

Abigail de Niverville, Piano and Oboe
Natalia Soltes, Piano and Theory
Sarah John, Voice and beginner Piano
Shawn Killaly, Drums and Percussion
Louis Simão, Piano, Guitar, Bass, Accordion
Cicy Chen, Piano
Leslie Townsend, Piano

We are really excited about our new team members, an invite you to view their biography pages to get to know them. If they don’t have a page linked, you can look for their page on the teachers page of our website in September.

School Year Lesson Schedule

For the most part your lesson times are the same as when you booked them in the spring. With the addition/departure of some teachers, there will be some some changes needed, however. In some cases, we’ve actually aligned some lessons better for families with multiple children, but required moves in others (or some combination thereof). We’ll be doing our best to call everyone with a change, but want to be especially sure to get you off to a good start. Please verify your schedule/timing below for the first week of September.

New Software

In the late part of last year we asked you to help ABC keep its costs down (and also its tuition) by switching from Credit Card payments to Void Cheque/PAP.

We took that exercise seriously, but did not limit ourselves to asking you to do the work on your own. We did a comprehensive review of all our expenses, and looked for ways to reduce or maximize the efficiency of our costs, so we would continue to do our part to keep tuition down.

As part of this exercise we’ve come across a new software management system which we actively transitioning to, now: Wellness Living.

For those of you that have been using our existing software, Mindbody, this will hopefully feel like an upgrade. There are some great features that will make things a lot easier to manage family accounts, and to get in touch directly. You can click on the link and log in, if you like, but please note that the accuracy of the information and system will be a work-in-progress until the end of September. If you see any erroneous information, we’ll appreciate any updates you make to your accounts.

Please note: We intend for the first billing of this system to occur on October 1st for all students. All previous registrations will be on the old system until the end of September. If you registered over the summer, or between now and the start of the school year, we’ll be billing you using this new system. Your patience is appreciated as we make this transition.

Is there a downside?

As with all transitions, we expect some bumps. We are hard at work to avoid problems, but here are the main areas that can come up:

Schedules may be transferred inaccurately
Payments may be transferred inaccurately, causing erroneous billing
Payment information will need to be updated

With your assistance and review of the appointment schedule above, we should have minimal cause for concern on scheduling.

Billing schedules will be very carefully audited, more than once, to make sure we avoid errors. Errors that are made will be refunded, or applied to the following month (the decision will be yours).

For security reasons, all payment information will have to be re-entered manually, since the previous system fully encrypted this data for your protection. We will do our best from our hard copy records, but it is likely that some of you (mostly those that pay by credit card), will get a phone call from us asking you to update us with your latest payment information. If your name appears below, you’ll need to update your information by logging in to the new software by clicking here, or calling the office. Please try to update the information on your own before calling, it should be easy to log in with your email address. If not, let us know, so we can figure out why.

Antoniali Gabriela
Birenbaum Alexandra
Birenbaum Samuel
Bravo Moffat Felix
Bravo Moffat Oscar
Brody Henry
Brown Landon
Byrne Ruairi
C/o Jacqueline Sutherland Nathaniel Osei-Afriyie
Cancian Arianna
Cerqueira Julian
Cunha Justin
Durand Nino
Ferber Leonie
Gerardo Cardenas
Giles Samuel
Guyana Jayna
Guyana Margot
Hayden-Roman Gabriel
Hayden-Roman Rafael
Iacovelli Mark
Leong Charlotte
Leong Griffin
Leong Vivienne
Maciver Claire
Magalhães Isabel
Mammoliti Alyssa
McKergow Chloe
Miller Aidan
Nilevsky Faye
Siu Koglin Jesse
Stern-Kubista Zola
Stevenson Thomas
Stevenson Thomas *please call
Valdegamo Gaian
Westby Emet
Westby Kollel