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Promoting students in the wrong school year

Tere Somoza

Hi everyone! I am hoping someone in the community can help me before July 1st, which is tomorrow and the start of our academic year. I was promoting students from grades, and realized halfway through, that I had selected the year to promote as being 2025-2026, instead of 2024-2025. I need to revert this back, what can I do? Any immediate help is greatly appreciated.

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David Gillespie

@Tere Somoza We promoted students “too early” this year (right after school ended) and I discovered that the only consequences are to these groups of students:

(1) Students who are graduated are “messed up” the most. We had to go back and hand-re-enroll all of the seniors back into the current year so they could get final comments written and parents could see grades (parents lose access when students become alumni). Then yesterday I had to go back one-by-one and make them alumni again; even though they were still associated with an alumni class, I had to delete and re-create each one or they didn't get the “Alumni” role. Painful.

(2) Withdrawn students similarly need to be re-enrolled manually, but you can just re-enroll them back into the current school year, that's quick even though it's individual.

(3) Repeating grade students (for us, that's only a handful of early childhood students) need to have their enrollment rows fixed to advance the grades.

All other “promotions” don't have any affect because they only create enrollment records for next year - you just made them ahead of time. No issue there. Most of the students probably had them until their graduation anyway.

The annoying part is that you can't run the promotion (or graduation) process on a grade level more than once, but support may be able to release that for you. That will only be a problem now if you need to withdraw specific students next year - you'll have to withdraw them individually rather than use the bulk process. And if you started promoting with the graduation class rather than your lowest class, then your early graduation will be the only painful one to fix … but mostly next year.

Tere Somoza

@David Gillespie thanks so much. I ended up talking to an agent at Blackbaud late at night, he told me that because no one had been graduated that I had not much to worry about. That it does exactly what you said, just adds a row to enrollment. Thanks again for the response. It definitely helped.

Lisa Tulchin

@David Gillespie Hi David, what do you mean by promoting students too early? Did you promote them before you updated your Years & Terms to 2025-2026? Or before you did your Master Rollover, or Term ended? Sorry, not trying to make you relive your pain, just need to justify to senior staff why we wait to do certain things and why they can't have everything right away.

Thanks!

-Lisa Tulchin

Mid-Pacific Institute

David Gillespie

@Lisa Tulchin
Oh, the system was all set up to do it, but we just didn't time it well. For many years now, we've made the transition on July 1. But there was pressure to do that earlier - to be able to give new students their account information before summer school starts, to get the forms systems (both August and Blackbaud) all running, etc. And we had some time in the office to do it, so we prepared everything and then graduated/promoted people on June 10, after the grading period ended. Then came the calls. Most of the issues were with seniors:

Parents of all seniors couldn't view the end-of-year grade reports - because when seniors become alumni, parents lose access.
Teachers of seniors couldn't write official notes for them anymore to reflect on the end of the year.
Teachers of students who were not returning couldn't enter grades or write official notes for them anymore. That one we could have mitigated by carefully editing the “as of” date - but we didn't see it coming. We thought people were done, but some divisions had a grade deadline of 6/20. Still, we couldn't launch forms with withdrawn students still in the system.

It was a huge mess, mostly to individually re-enroll the seniors and then, a few days ago, to individually remove them again and re-add the Alumni role since the “Graduate” function returned no students.

Basically, I ended up writing to division directors and nurses (for forms) and saying “we tried, and now we're never doing that again.” So our rollover date is now permanently July 1. That's when we will graduate/promote students and import new families from Raiser's Edge (we don't use Blackbaud admissions). Summer school students who are new can log into Canvas using a personal email and we'll transition it later. Official Notes (used for summer school comments) can be written for all students - returning and new - starting on July 2, and that meshes with the summer school deadline of July 11. Pushpages can be sent to all families, including new folks, starting July 2. Database is synced up with August by July 3 at the latest. Forms for us are launching on Monday the 7th.

Relatedly, we've had to develop - and remind people annually - what the “service expectations” should be for new student, family, and employee accounts in Blackbaud and our email system, both the first bulk load (July 1) and then as new people join after that date. It was getting to be chaos the number of one-off requests for new faculty we were receiving in the spring, and we finally cleared with the administrative team an understanding that we just won't do that anymore. Everyone is added on July 1, and all divisions know it can take up to one week (five business days) to process any accounts for families or employees who are new after then. “Even right at the start of school,” I always have to emphasize.