NASIS News --January 2009

In This Issue

Are You Ready?

Helping You Help Yourself

Four Issues
We will be sending NASIS News on a quarterly basis. In the Fall, Winter, Spring and Summer.

Are You Ready?
End of Year Processes

Spring has sprung! Now is the time for NASIS Administrators to focus on those “end of year processes” and prepare for next fall. There are several major processes to concentrate on.

Create a new calendar and roll selected items into the new calendar (such as courses, period schedules, term dates, etc.)
Roll students forward
Run Enrollment End Batch
Fix any retained students’ enrollments
Post Grades & Transcripts
Insert end dates on user accounts that will not be used in 09-10.
Run the ISEP Verification Report

To create a new calendar, navigate to System Administration>Calendar>Calendar Wizard. The majority of schools will use the second option listed, “Create new Calendars by rolling forward selected data.” It is fine for schools to start to roll their calendar and then come back to finish it if all the information is not yet decided by the school, such as holidays. It is best practice to have, at a minimum, the term beginning and end dates for 09-10 to insert into the new calendar. For more in-depth instructions, refer to the BIE End of Year Processes User Guide on the Support Portal or submit a ticket to support for over the phone consultation.

Are You Ready?
Beginning of the Year Checklist

With the start of the 2009-10 school year quickly approaching, we would like to remind you to start preparing for the first day of school. Below is a checklist to follow. Please note that not all items apply to all schools, depending on your school’s level of use within your NASIS application. You may disregard those tasks that do not apply to your school. We suggest reading through the tasks and checking off those that are done, and following up on those that are not or those you have questions on.

(The items below are sorted by module within the application.)

Helping You Help Yourself
NASIS Mailing List Management

As you know, schools can share comments and questions about using NASIS with other BIE schools using the NASIS Listserv email address: nasislist@lists.infinitecampus.com. This list is more than just a tool for the BIE and Infinite Campus to communicate important updates. You can also manage which of your email addresses is configured to send or receive listserv messages with the Infinite Campus Mailing List manager. Access to this tool is:
http://lists.infinitecampus.com/sympa/

If you do not already have a password, click on the “First Login?” link on the left side of the page. A password will be emailed to you so that you can log on.

Best Practice
Mid-year System Changes

As schools transition from one school year to the next, it is recommended that the structure of calendar and other areas in the system, like course set up and grading, be planned ahead of time. Each tab on the calendar (System Administration>Calendar>Calendar) should be taken into consideration.

On the Calendar Tab, the dates and minutes need to be established. Grade levels must be in place on the Grades Tab. The school needs to decide if there will be multiple schedule structures and those need to be reflected on the Schedule Structure Tab. Be aware that Schedule Structures affect everything – from enrollments to attendance recording to course layout. Term dates, the number of periods in a period schedule, as well as the number of period schedules need to be set. For more details on properly setting these up, please refer to the Calendar Administration User Guide found on the Customer Portal.

Best practice dictates that no changes should be made to your calendar after school starts. For example, changing a period schedule or schedule structure mid-year directly affects attendance. Also we do not recommend changing any course names, grading scales or score groups, as you may lose grades that have been posted.

We do understand that some changes are unavoidable and if this is the case, please consult with NASIS support by submitting a case through the Customer Portal. We can offer advice as to what is possible and practical. There are many dependencies in the database schema that need to be taken into account when implementing mid-year system changes. The support team can help your school avoid potential pitfalls.

Hot Topics
Setting Up Your Summer School Calendar in NASIS

With summer school programs right around the corner, it is important that you and your team are ready. A summer school calendar is set up similar to your academic and/or residential calendar. The additional calendar can be used to track data and information for your summer school program.

Schools generally create a separate calendar for their summer school session. Use the Calendar Wizard found in System Administration>Calendar>Calendar Wizard.

If you created a summer school calendar last year and will be following a similar structure, you will want to roll forward the calendar, courses, and sections like you do for your academic/residential calendar(s).

If this is your first summer school calendar or significant changes have been made since last year’s structure, you will want to create a new blank calendar.

Tech Focus
The Calendar and Attendance

The Calendar for a school contains data elements that are critical for enrollments, attendance (including the ADA/ADM calculations), scheduling and grading periods used for a school. The purpose of this article is to help your school determine the proper setup to obtain the most accurate attendance data for the students at your school.

Before creating the calendar(s) for your school, there are a few things that you need to consider to determine if you need one calendar or multiple calendars to obtain the most accurate attendance. In order to determine if you need multiple calendars, you should consider the following:

Are the Period Schedules the same for all Students?
Are the Student Day minutes the same for all Students?
Are the Instructional Days the same for all Students?
Is the Term Schedule the same for all Students?

If you have answered NO to one or more of these questions, it is most likely that you will need to create multiple calendars for your school.

Note: creating multiple schedule structures in the same calendar can accomplish similar results as creating multiple calendars. However, it is our recommendation that the best practice is to create multiple calendars instead.

NASIS Speak

NASIS Listserv: a mailing list for schools to share ideas and receive important communications regarding NASIS.

School Year: The School Years tab lists all of the years for which data is stored in NASIS. Only one school year is marked as the active year at any given time. (System Administration>Calendar>School Years).

Enrollment Roll Forward: The automated process of promoting students into the next calendar and grade.

ADA: Average Daily Attendance or ADA is an aggregate of student attendance days, which, depending on the state you are in, can be (total of days attended times percent enrolled) divided by number of school days in the year, or a total FTE based on minutes a student is present divided by total instructional minutes a school is in session during the year.

ADM: Average Daily Membership or ADM is an aggregate of student membership days, which, depending on the state you are in, can be (total of enrollment days times percent enrolled) divided by number of school days in the year, or a total FTE based on minutes a student is scheduled divided by total instructional minutes a school is in session during the year.