Help with diploma setup

Sarah Herrick
Sarah Herrick
Third Anniversary Kudos 1 Name Dropper Participant
in Blackbaud Student Information System™

Hi. At our school, we have a requirement that students take a certain number of P.E. credits each year: three credits in 9th grade and two credits each in grades 10 - 12. I started by setting up a general P.E. requirement with a minimum of 9 credits, but this doesn't allow for the enforcement of our grade-level requirements (meaning a student could potentially frontload their P.E. credits and not take any in their senior year). I then tried to set up course groups but courses can only be assigned to one course group and our P.E. courses are open to all grade levels. It seems that I can only set up requirements by department, subject or specific course(s) Is there really no way to set up a requirement based on the year (grade level) in which the course is taken? If you have a workaround for this, please share! Thank you.

Comments

  • Chris Felinski
    Chris Felinski
    Eighth Anniversary Kudos 2 Name Dropper Participant

    @Sarah Herrick The way we do it is we have a class setup for each year. For example, we have 2023-24 Strength and Conditioning, 2023-24 Fitness, 2023-24 Advanced Strength, etc. Then each year we have to duplicate the courses with new academic years so that we can track PE on a per year basis. The negative is that we to add 6-8 new courses every year, which are the same course, but the only difference is the year so we can group by year.

    We considered naming each of our class with Fr, So, Jr, Sr in front of the course names and use the same courses each year; but then for a given period, a teacher had 4 gradebooks and attendance lists to maintain, one for each grade level…

    Maybe there is a better way to do it, but that is how we have tackled it.

  • Catherine Druhan
    Catherine Druhan
    Third Anniversary Kudos 1 Name Dropper Participant

    Hi @Sarah Herrick I am interested in your post because making use of the diploma set up, graduation requirements, and course requests is one of my new year's goals. BUT if I can't track requirements by grade level there is no point, we will just keep using paper since we are small enough. I hate to see us spending so much money on BB and not be able to use all the features!

  • Sarah Herrick
    Sarah Herrick
    Third Anniversary Kudos 1 Name Dropper Participant

    @Catherine Druhan Hi! I could not agree with you more!

  • Erin Caprielian
    Erin Caprielian
    Second Anniversary Kudos 1 Name Dropper Facilitator 1

    @Sarah Herrick I have the same question! We have similar requirements (e.g. students must take one math class each year in upper school, so even if they took Algebra 1 H in 8th grade and earned transcript credit, that math class would not count towards the requirement for 9th/10th/11th/12th grade years). I appreciate the option that Chris shared but it's not feasible for us. Have you identified another solution?

  • Sarah Herrick
    Sarah Herrick
    Third Anniversary Kudos 1 Name Dropper Participant

    @Erin Caprielian Hi. I have not come up with another solution, no. I am meeting with someone from Blackbaud this week and will keep you posted. Fingers crossed!

  • Deb McCullough
    Deb McCullough
    Tenth Anniversary Name Dropper Facilitator 1 Loyalty Badge

    @Sarah Herrick I'm running into the same issue. It would be great if BB allowed catalog years to be part of the setup. It would eliminate all of the classes dumping into 1 year.

  • Stephanie Ames
    Stephanie Ames
    First Anniversary Kudos 1 Name Dropper Facilitator 1

    @Sarah Herrick I'd like to know if you've found a good solution that does not require creating all new courses! I have a similar need and haven't been able to find a good solution.

  • Sarah Herrick
    Sarah Herrick
    Third Anniversary Kudos 1 Name Dropper Participant

    @Stephanie Ames Unfortunately, I have not. The only thing I've considered, but have given very little thought to, is to create placeholder courses that bear credit but do not appear on the report card or transcript. So, for example, at the end of 9th grade, if the student took all three terms of P.E., then they would be enrolled and graded in some generic course like PE100. Although this requires creating a system to keep track of the classes they've taken to confirm they're “eligible” for the placeholder course … which kind-of defeats the purpose. I'm not really looking for more work here! Longwinded to say, I'll keep you posted but I've been striking out so far with anything I've tried. It's super frustrating.

Categories