Chemawa accepted the challenge to become a pilot school for NASIS and has been live since July 2006. As with all organizations, change is often met with resistance.  The main stakeholders at the school were reluctant to begin another “change” when NASIS was first introduced. They felt that their previous student information system worked, and that they were already very familiar with it. Chemawa’s staff has worked through the normal growing pains to fully embrace the NASIS program and incorporate it into everyday processes.

One of the ways Chemawa used to overcome the hurdles of using a new system was to take the Bureau-mandated trainings and train their staff. This helped get the staff buy-in to move forward with a new system. Another advantage was that their NASIS Administrator took the time to become a Bureau Certified Trainer (BCT). Their on-site BCT helps with training and retraining of all staff.

Best Practices
The final step in closing out the 2007-2008 school year is to end your current enrollments. It is important to roll your students forward prior to ending your student enrollments for 2007-2008. Rolling your enrollments forward prior to ending them will allow you to enroll your students into next year’s calendar in a batch. Remember to identify all students that will not be promoted in 2008-2009 and check their enrollments after you have rolled them forward to verify the enrollment has the correct grade level. Once you have rolled your enrollments forward, you will want to end your enrollments using the Enrollment End Batch tool.

More Best Practices
User Security – Ending Staff Accounts in NASIS

Along with your other year-end tasks,  Infinite Campus recommends ending or disabling staff accounts at the end of the school year due to high staff turnover. Keeping the staff user accounts current and up to date adds another level of security for the NASIS system.

You can end a staff account using an expiration date or disable it using the Disable checkbox on the user’s account tab. The method used to inactivate the account should be according to school policy. When establishing this policy keep in mind that an account can be disabled for a number of reasons whereas entering an expiration date clearly indentifies when a user could no longer access the system.

Are You Ready?
A Summer Project?

The Census module is an integral part of your NASIS system. Other modules in the program such as Special Education are dependent on complete and accurate census data. Clean census data will make other processes, such as attendance and behavior letters, parent portal and in the future, transportation work seamlessly within your NASIS system.

Hot Topics
The results are in!

First, the NASIS team would like to extend our appreciation to those who participated in our newsletter survey. The feedback we received gives us more ideas to better serve schools, staff and ultimately students. Your responses will also shape future newsletters.

To summarize, most individuals who took the survey were primarily NASIS Administrators followed by Registrars and Teachers. They get most of their information via email or phone calls and we were happy to see that many people also use the NASIS Project Portal as a resource. The newsletter articles that are of the most interest  are those with a technical focus. Due to the high response to this question, more articles will have a technical emphasis in the future. New product features and upcoming events were other favorites.

Helping You Help Yourself
Do you have ideas, questions, or want to share a best practice?

The NASIS Listserv is a network for NASIS users and leaders. It is a resources center to share your thoughts, ideas, best practices and knowledge about the NASIS application with other users and leaders. It is a networking system that allows users to find opportunities within the NASIS application and post needs and questions about the system.

What is a Listserv?
A listserv is an automated means of distributing email. Mail sent to a listserve is automatically sent to all members of the listerv. It is intended to provide a medium for rapid exchange of information, assistance, and discussion.