This time of year we receive many questions about the new student onboarding process, snow and school cancellation days, and the use of weights and credits on transcripts and report cards. Included below are tips, news, FACTS SIS Help links, and best practices that might be useful for you at this point in the school year.
FACTS SIS Training Outlines
Training outlines provide a helpful step-by step approach to features of the FACTS SIS system. This might be a good time to review the links under Admissions, Grading in FACTS SIS: Understanding Report Cards, and Academics.
What’s New?
The recently released FACTS Family App acts as the mobile hub where schools and families meet. In one easy-to-use app, families can access grades, calendars, announcements, and more. If your school uses Premier Billing, FACTS SIS, or FACTS Giving, the FACTS Family App integrates with all three products, making it easier than ever for parents to access key information, make payments, and donate anytime, anywhere. Learn more about the app, request more information, or sign up for a webinar here.
Resource Center
Clicking the question mark (?) at the top of any page in FACTS SIS directs you to our Resource Center. This very helpful source provides links to live training, on-demand sessions, and on-screen learning for many of the features in FACTS SIS. This might be a good time to check the Resource Center for information on what’s new, an application and enrollment refresher, report cards for teachers and administrators, and more.
Emergency Closing Days
There are a few things that need to be done when your school has an unplanned school cancellation day (snow, anyone?). Here’s how to set yourself up for success when school comes back into session:
- Send out a Parent Alert to notify your parents that there is an unplanned closing or late start.
- Update the Family Portal Calendar to reflect the unplanned closing day.
- Block off the day in Day Setup so that your Year and Term count will reflect the correct total number of days for the school year, and so that the system won’t expect any attendance to be taken on that day. This also includes updating your Day Rotation if you have a rotating (A day, B day for example) schedule.
- Teachers should be sure to move their lesson plans ahead to accommodate the closing day(s).
Application & Enrollment
Be sure to check out this review of the new student process highlighting the big picture items. It will be helpful as schools move into the application and enrollment season.
Best Practices
Many schools have multiple partitions and students will often move between them. For example, when a 5th grade student graduates from the elementary partition to enter 6th grade in the middle school partition.
When this happens, it is important to mark them as “inactive” in the elementary partition before they move into the middle school partition.
Not marking a student inactive could cause a few issues. For instance, the students and parents would be able to see calendar events for the other partition when the event isn’t set to “district wide.” Another problem could arise when utilizing Create-a-Report if you are looking for data from students that have officially graduated from your school–not just graduated to another partition.
