Connect/RE Mishandles Graduation

John Ronan

Does anyone use Connect/RE (CRE)?

Is this the right place to discuss this? If not, please tell me where.

My problem is with the way CRE changes constituent codes on parents when a child graduates.

When a child enrolls, the parent becomes a ‘current parent’.

When that child graduates, the parent becomes a ‘parent of alumni’ [or somesuch code]…

This makes sense.

However, when this child graduates, if the parent has a younger child in the school [who is still a current student], the parent stays as a current parent until the younger child either graduates or withdraws. ONLY after the “disposal” of the second child will the parent be given the ‘parent of alumni’ code even though the parent is for all the world a parent of alumni at the moment of the first child's graduation!

I was told that this is by design. I cannot for the life of me figure out why it would be designed like this. Once a child graduates, a parent should be labeled as a ‘parent of alumni’. [and may, of course also continue to be a ‘current parent’].

It seems that what this logic does is to defer representing a fact that happened now [older kid graduated] until something unrelated happens later. [the younger child graduates…or withdraws, etc.].

I know it's a forbidden word, but can someone convince me that this isn't a bug??

Chris Felinski

We have a lot of problems with ConnectRE and how it updates constituent codes. The logic you are describing to me is somewhat similar to what I am dealing with. We have constit codes of Past Parent and Current Parent. We have some siblings that are exactly 4 years apart, so when the first one graduates, they get the consist code of past parent while at the same time having a separate constit code of current parent… We have used ConnectRE for 5 years now and every single year we have issues where our development office basically has to go through by hand because of some of the ConnectRE logic as well as the fact that we can't choose records to update - it is either an all or nothing when the data update occurs…

John Ronan

Chris, do you mean that you do not like the fact that the parent you described has both current parent and past parent?

In my opinion/preference, the parents should have both in that case because this would accurately describe the fact that these are parents of a former student as well as parents of a current student. [we specifically use the term ‘alum parent’ to distinguish from a parent of a student who transferred out].

If the answer is ‘yes’, then maybe it's simply the utility needs to be enhanced to allow a choice in this case.

Geoffrey Goodfellow

We only use a School Parent constituent code. Connect RE assigns this code when the first child enters our school and assigns a Start Date to the code but leaves the End Date open which lets us know that the constituent is a current parent. When the last child departs our school, Connect RE assigns an End Date to this same School Parent constituent code which signifies that the constituent is no longer a current parent, but the dates remain as a historical record of when they were a parent with our school.

It is our various queries and lists in RE where we adjust the criteria accordingly…finding parents with no End Date gives us current parents, and finding parents with an End Date gives us past parents. For any communication with Alumni parents, we would typically be doing that using the Alumni record as the primary point of contact, but we have the option to target the parent relationship of our Alumni to get to the alumni parents. This also permits us to distinguish between past parents of alumni versus past parents of students that never graduated (withdrew/transfer).

In short, we don't assign a specific Alumni Parent or Past Parent constituent code because it didn't work well with Connect RE and also represented additional codes to manage when we were able to get the same information using fewer codes. However, no doubt that queries can be much simpler if you have a code for everything since you just look for any records that have that code. In what I described above, it requires a few more parameters to not only look for those codes but also when the codes were active, but it has been very manageable.

Not sure the above scenario would work for other institutions, but I thought I would share what as worked well for us.

Chris Felinski

I like the idea of Past Parent and Current Parent at the same time. But given how our system was setup years ago (which was from a previous system we migrated from), we only had one constit code about parent status at a time - either they were a past parent or a current parent, and we had no start or end dates. Something we will re-evaluate in the future. The more I look at it though, it makes sense from a historical data perspective to know when constits were current parents or not.