There are two full pages of ideas expressing frustration with responsible signers in EMS, many of them relating specifically to how they interface with Tuition Management. It is a total nightmare for parents in split families, blended families, step-siblings where one parent is the same but not the other one, and so on.

Grandparents sometimes pay tuition for their grandchildren, who have different parents, and those parents need to be able to sign school forms, but because the grandparent needs to be the sole responsible signer on the contract, the parents are prevented from seeing school forms. Allowing the parent access to school forms prevents the grandparent from completing an integrated contract.

In a couple of extreme cases we have needed to leave deceased parents on accounts and cannot add a new step-parent when the surviving parent remarries because it causes responsible-signer conflicts between EMS and BBTM. Think about how it would feel - on either side! - for a school to need to tell a parent that because of how a database is set up, we need to leave a deceased spouse on a student's account for the duration of the student's enrollment so that a contract integration would work correctly.

In 2024, with how family situations have become unique and continue to evolve, this is completely unacceptable. It makes schools look clueless at best, and heartless at worst. This setup absolutely must be reimagined from the ground up.

At a minimum, please consider the following:

• Separate "responsible form signer" from "responsible for tuition". In some cases a single parent is responsible for all of tuition. Even if the parents are not linked as spouses in EMS, they will be attached in BBTM, and the school needs to remember every year to go in and remove the parent that is not responsible so that Blackbaud knows not to provide financial access to that parent.

• Allow for contract integration in situations where parent A has two children, one of whom has parent B and the other has parent C (or similar situations). Currently, parent A can only do an integrated contract with one or the other, but not both.

• If there is a change in responsible signers in EMS from one contract year to the next, allow for school staff to approve that change in Tuition Management so that billing history can remain consistent and mistakes can be fixed without requiring continuous manual contract returns and account rollovers.

Our students are in many cases with us for a decade or longer, and their living situations can change constantly during that time. We need to ensure that the databases can keep up with those changes, and right now they are not doing so. Any progress toward being able to do so, however incremental, would be welcomed.