Report Card Viewing - Limited Access/Viewing

Mary Stanton

Would appreciate some insight please – we are using K12 Report Cards for the first time this year and have a few staff members who need VIEW ONLY access to ALL student report cards. Am curious how other schools handle providing access to report cards for specific individuals at the school. (FYI, we do not use Gradebooks.)

Our Learning Specialist and School Counselor have the role of Teacher in the system but technically are not identified as a teacher for any specific class (academic group); I am trying to grant them access to view any student’s report card. At this point we are not making report cards visible to all Teachers; teachers will only have visibility to student’s report cards who are in that teacher’s class so I can’t use the global setting to allow all teachers visibility.

I have cloned the Grading Manager role and only enabled a few tasks: 1. ‘View Report Cards’ 2. ‘Academic Profile’ 3.’ Dashboard Academics’ and 4. ‘People Finder’ tasks. However, the users with this cloned role are still not able to view report cards. The Performance tab does not show when they access a student’s record via People Finder.

Per Support, I need to enable the following tasks in this cloned role, ‘Generate Report Cards’ under Reporting and ‘Report cards’ under Report Card Setup however, the problem with this is it then grants these users the ability to add, edit, delete report card templates which I do NOT want them to have.

How do other schools manage this type of limited access? Any suggestions are appreciated!

Scott Chrysler

@Mary Stanton - A way around this is to create an advisory that includes every student and make the Learning Specialists and the Counselors the advisors. Then permit advisors to see report cards.

Hope that helps.

Scott

Corrine Duncan

@Mary Stanton if you add the “Academic Profile” task and sub-task “View Performance” to your cloned Grading role this should show through the Performance tab and allow the viewing of the report card from the student lookup in People Finder. At least this works for our school/users. We are still using the ”old" report card format but I think it would accomplish the same for the new report cards. Hope this helps.

There does not seem to be a more granular ability in the new report card templates to allow for viewing/generating only. At least none that I was able to find.

Mary Stanton

@Scott Chrysler Thanks Scott! We currently don't have/use Advisors but I will look into this option!

Mary Stanton

@Corrine Duncan Thanks Corrine!! That worked ? Not sure how I missed that task/sub-task but the more frustrating part was Support was not able to figure this out as I didn't believe it would be this hard or complicated.

Now to continue working with Support so see if they can figure out why these particular users with the new cloned role (that really only has View type tasks), can record grades for any/all classes??? They are telling me that because they also have a Teacher role they can record grades but they still shouldn't be able to enter grades for classes where they are not the teacher. I may need to use Scott's suggestion to make them Advisors and see if that eliminates the issue of them having additional abilities.

Thanks again for your help!

Corrine Duncan

@Mary Stanton Agree about the ability to record grades when grading plans are open. It is not very intuitive that giving those accesses gives them the ability to edit/add grades to any class. Teachers are only able to edit grades for their own classes that they are enrolled as a teacher so I have a hard time bridging that to why these users get that access.

A note about creating the advisories and adding the teachers to those advisories and all students. If you use official notes, will need to check those settings to make sure the advisors do not receive them as this could flood their inboxes with any official note written on the students in that advisory. I am not certain off the top of my head if it will give them any other additional access.

Scott Chrysler

@Mary Stanton - I created the role in your initial post with the tweaks @Corrine Duncan suggested. When I give that role to a person who has our Faculty constituent role, they can enter grades for any class via Academics > Grades > Grades management. However, if I give the new role to someone who has our Non-Teaching Staff constituent role, they do not have access to enter any grades. So somewhere in the cloned role, the Grade Manager's power to enter grades for all courses is enhancing the limited grade entry ability of a Faculty. It appears to be a hidden task in the Grade Manager role. Hopefully, Blackbaud will figure it out.

Mary Stanton

@Scott Chrysler @Corrine Duncan Based on my testing I had also concluded that it must be ‘hidden’ tasks for Grading Mgr and Teacher roles however, what is strange is that I have one user who also has a Teacher role and the cloned role (and some other roles) and she cannot enter grades for everyone; however, she initially could enter grades but when I contacted Support somewhere along the way she ‘magically’ was fixed but I can't seem to get an answer as to what is different. I do appreciate all your input and testing!

Thanks for the tip regarding Official Notes Corinne - I will have to do some more research/testing to see if Advisory is the right direction for us. As of now we only use Official Notes for Admissions but since we are constantly deploying more K12 functionality I don't want to set myself up for problems later if we do decide to use them more.

Ben Taylor

@Mary Stanton In our environment we allow all teachers to be able to run report cards for all students, albeit with a later-timed release. This has been since the beginning of using this SIS, and I can't recall a moment it caused a problem. We find it useful for an array of reasons, but mostly because our students encounter so many teachers in their career the distinction is sort of moot.

By adding a viewing date for “all school teachers” under grades>report card setup>edit>access grades>edit access grades that is a few days later than advisers etc. we nuance when that visibility turns on and people can get report cards from the directory or rosters etc. Not a direct answer to your question, but certainly the reason why I haven't encountered that as an obstacle at our school.

The Advisor group idea people shared is a good one, and what we do with our Head Advisers (class deans) but they are correct that you get a bunch more privileges and official notes from being tagged as adviser. I wonder, though, if those mental health professionals should be on monitoring teams for those kind of notes anyway, so it might be a blessing in disguise? Especially if each person is responsible for specific grades, then they could be put in an advisory roster with just those students, get just those notes, and get access to just those report cards.

Ben Taylor

@Benjamin Taylor Just recalled one more idea. If you are a day school there is a “dorm supervisor” role you can repurpose. If you aren't using that you can assign that role to people who you want to have RC access, configure THAT to have its own opening date, and that will grant access to report cards without grade editing access.

Susan Ott

@Benjamin Taylor - I agree. I cloned the Dorm Supervisor role years ago, named it Registrar Viewer and gave the role to all our senior admin. It has worked really well. It is also handy for schedule sets, group page access, etc. One thing to note is that it has to be assigned through the Employment interface.

Mary Stanton

@Susan Ott @Benjamin Taylor Thank you so much for the suggestions and info! Since we are a Preschool and Elementary day school the idea of a cloned Dorm Supervisor role may actually be the easiest to implement but since we are now looking into using functionality like Learning Profiles and Official Notes in the future it may make sense for me to look into the Advisory roles for longer term. I agree Benjamin that giving these employees a more complete picture of the students makes sense however, today most of the information that these mental health professionals would need is NOT kept in our SIS. Hoping that may change down the road.

One question - assuming I clone the Dorm Supervisor role, does that mean when I apply a date/time for report cards to be visible to Dorm Supervisors on the ‘Edit Report Card Access’ screen that that applies to any cloned dorm supervisor roles?

For the time being, those employees have the cloned role I created with the ability of recording grades but they have been told “just don’t touch the Grading Mgmt” page - not the most secure way to handle but being a relatively small school it works for now I will do some further research based on all your input. THANKS to everyone again!

Susan Ott

@Mary Stanton - yes, to your question about access to Dorm Supervisor extending to cloned roles. I have the main role inactivated (and it looks like it is now called Dorm Group Manager) and just have the cloned role as active. Under schedule sets and group page access, the cloned name appears. Under report cards, Dorm Supervisor appears.

Mary Stanton

@Susan Ott Thanks Susan!