Hello Everybody!
We are very excited to start Kazoo this summer with you! There are number of things that we need to inform you about for a smooth experience as we go forward and into the fall season.
You’ll see a bit of an uptick in email frequency as we transition to the summer, so keep your eyes peeled.
The next email you’ll likely see is a giveaway that we’ll be doing for our existing families, so definitely watch out for that!
Summer Registration Update – Get 10% More Off!
At the moment the price for 10 weeks is $183.16, same as this spring. This is 30% off our regular seasonal pricing. If you register for the Summer and the Fall at the same time, you’ll get 10% off the above pricing for this summer.
Remember, normally you would only get 5-9 weeks with our summer pass, but this year you get unlimited online classes, story times, and our great Campfire program at a single all-inclusive price for the whole family.
Please Help Us Close Registration!
We are trying to finish registration by Friday, June 12th. If we haven’t called you yet, please call the office at 416-651-7529 and let us know if we can count you in for the Fall and the Summer. We are aiming to be done by Friday, June 12th.
Billing will occur on July 1st for the Summer.
Fall Billing usually happens now, to hold your spot in your class for October, with your regular billing cycle resuming in November. As a result of our current public health situation, our plan is to bill the regular rate for October ($87.73). If we are still needing to do Online classes in the fall, we’ll adjust this to $70.18 per month, which will be a 20% reduction from our regular seasonal pricing. In this event November’s billing would be adjusted for the October overage. Complicated – we know!
To be clear, we are proceeding as though we are offering in-person classes in the fall. If we end up virtual, and you do not wish to participate, we will refund you at your request.
Lastly, we respect and understand that many families have had income changes that may affect your confidence in what the future holds. We can set your billing to October 1st, and are happy to consider any other support we can offer. Please let whomever you speak to know if you need this.
Online Family Portal Changes
As we roll into the summer, we are going to be adding some new programs, and this will require us to re-build the family portal a little bit.
You probably already noticed that the ‘pop-out’ bar with the login button on our website has been replaced by a big red button in our main menu. This has a drop-down that links to the Family Portal.
For now this takes you directly to the current classes we have for Music Together and Rhythm Kids. Soon this will change to show a list of the online programs we offer, and you will be able to choose the season of classes that you will see.
New Password for Kazoo
As part of the change to the new portal and new season of classes, you should receive a new code for the summer classes. Expect this towards the end of the month, perhaps alongside your new book.
The password for the spring classes will remain the same, so you can continue to watch those, if you like.
Important Note About Your Privacy in Online Classes
Up to week 5 we did not intentionally include any families in our recordings of our classes.
We have, however, been very concerned throughout this entire time about engaging your children in a meaningful way that does not limit them to being consumers; We aren’t presenters when we do in-person classes, and we’d like to avoid that as much as possible now.
Since week #6 you may have noticed a mid-class opportunity for personal interaction with your teacher, as we have been experimenting with how we can interact more during classes. These interactions are now part of the recording.
As part of our Policies and Procedures we do have a media release, but we want to be especially transparent about this happening.
We remind you that these recordings are only for families taking classes with ABC, and are posted unlisted to YouTube, so they cannot be found without the direct link, which is only listed on our password-protected parent portal.
Don’t want to be seen? This is no problem! Just turn off your camera during interactive parts of the class, or at the beginning of class. You have the freedom to self-select to your level of comfort. Just remember that it is a greater challenge for us to engage with you and your children if we can’t see you.
Interactions before and after class are never part of the recording.
Survey Coming Soon
We will be asking you to do a survey for us soon, hopefully before the end of June.
Please take the time to complete this for us, as it will be extremely important to us to find out how we are doing, and how we can do better!
We had planned to get this out to you sooner, but with all of the things happening, it was delayed…at least now we get to ask you about how we’ve done with the public health situation, as well!