Goodbye and good riddance to frustrating registration process

Why did it take so long to fix the process for registering for city-run rec programs, ask Edward Keenan.

Thestar.com
March 9, 2016
By Edward Keenan

This morning - Wednesday morning - parents in Toronto are engaging in a time-honoured tradition, perhaps for the last time. At recreation centres across downtown, they are lining up in the morning darkness, standing vigil in the March cold. In living rooms from Riverdale to Parkdale, they are assembling every piece of communications technology in the house, refreshing browsers and speed re-dialing, with family ID numbers and program codes ready to deploy.

It is a forging ground, a test of patience, timing, and resourcefulness that rewards the lucky few - those who succeed will enter their children into swimming lessons and get to brag that they made it, through their feats of will and determination and the grace of God. Those who dial too slowly, or oversleep, or forget their codes ... well, let’s not discuss it.

It is a piece of Toronto’s heritage, this frustrating and convoluted registration process run by the city’s Parks, Forestry and Recreation department. And for generations of parents it has been a shared bond of adversity. “Why can’t they fix this?” bleary-eyed parents have said to each other, clutching their hair in their hands as they stare at the tauntingly named “FUN” guide full of programs they failed to get into, just as their parents did before them.

And yesterday, Mayor John Tory announced a plan to end that tradition, robbing future parents of the sense of accomplishment that comes with overcoming pointless obstacles and daunting challenges. He appointed a three-member panel to begin working on both short-term and long-term fixes for the registration process. Mayor Tory says there will be an “entirely new system” in place by next year.

As long and bizarrely proud as the tradition of the seasonal frustration festival has been, it’s safe to say very few people will miss it. Like having to make your own candles, or using outhouses in the wintertime, there are some traditions of hardship that are easy to leave behind when technology makes them pointless.

The main question most will ask is, what took so long?

If you’re trying to book a hotel, you can go to a variety of websites and enter your preferred room size, approximate price, and neighbourhood and immediately all the options close to your preferences, from multiple chains and independent hoteliers, will be immediately presented to you. Click, click, and you’re booked. If you try to buy something at Amazon, the website will immediately recognize your account and show you other things you are likely to want. Search for a book at the local library - in a library system run by the same government as rec programs! - and it will show you all holdings by the same author at every branch in the system, and offer you the option of ordering them held or transferred for you right there.

No race to connect, at the precise second things become available, where a momentarily scrambled wi-fi connection means disaster. No cross referencing paper books and PDF printouts to look up options and alternatives one by one, for each potential location on a different page. No hassle.

Can this panel make booking recreation registration as simple as booking a hotel or buying a book? It should be able to. And people will rightly celebrate if they do. Tory told me last fall-and repeated at his press conference Tuesday-that he hears about this more than virtually any other issue except transit. “Fix that,” he told me they say, “and we’ll vote for you for life.”

Let us not celebrate yet. The panel is appointed, and the work is just begun. Even if they manage to build a great user interface for online registration - and they should - there will still be shortages of space in some programs (though Siri Agrell of the mayor’s office says only 35 per cent of programs are full after the first hour of registration, even if many parents unable to connect to the system have given up in frustration before then). But a better system will make it easier and less frustrating to try to register, whether you get in or not, and will point clearly to where more or less programming is needed, without trying to guess how registration hassles are warping demand.

I suspect many parents, schooled by hard experience, will believe the changes when they see them.

But if you spent the morning trying to register, take those locks of hair you ripped out of your head in frustration and put them in an album. You may be able to show them to your grandchildren as you tell them you were among the last to endure the hardships that have been our city’s recreational heritage.

The plan to change rec registration

*The city has 80,000 recreational programs and classes that right now register 600,000 people per year.

*Mayor John Tory said the current registration system, developed 20 years ago, is held together with "chewing gum and chicken wire."

*The panel appointed to improve the system consists of Paula Kwan, Head of Global Expansion at Pivotal Labs; Alex Norman, General Manager of TechTo; and Jeremy Bell, Chief of Design at Precision Nutrition. Mayor Tory will sit in on panel meetings.

*The can share ideas and opinions about rec registration attoronto.ca/haveyoursay