Management - All Things Calendars...

One of the first things that needs to be done to start the year is to set the district's calendars. The calendars inform the applications of when a term is active and what year to put things in when they are archived. 

In Eduphoria > Management > School Calendars there are two kinds of calendars that do different things in the software. Let's take a look at what they do!

Instructional Calendar

This is the overarching “main” calendar titled with the school year (i.e. 2019-20) and has a + to the left (which opens up the reporting calendar(s). What does it do?

• Counts the number of instructional days - having in-service and holidays inserted into the instructional calendar allows for an accurate count of instructional days within
• This count effects Forethought and teacher planners
• Dictates which year items are placed in when archiving
• For Strive - Depending on how you evaluate users throughout the year, your instructional calendar may need to be extended beyond the last day of instruction to capture evaluation documents for archive as the system will not archive a document not found within an instructional year (it does not know where it goes and skips it)
• Or, the beginning of the instructional calendar may need to be backdated to capture any goals created before the start of the year. 
• However, as this may affect the number of instructional days viewed in Forethought, you can set the instructional calendar start/end dates back to their original dates after you run the archive
• Instructional calendars should never overlap as this can cause errors with processes depending on the instructional calendar

Reporting Calendar

These are the calendars that display when you click the + next to the instructional  calendar. These calendars tell the system when term two (and term 3, 4, etc if applicable) becomes active and therefore, which classes and students a teacher has access to and which students are active to take a given assessment. There can be as many of these reporting calendars as needed and they can be individually assigned to the campuses that will use them (Management > Manage Schools > select a school > Current Reporting Year drop down). For example, you may have one campus that has four terms, while the others have two. 

• Generally titled with the term/cycle breakdown
• Terms - this often reflects the reporting period. For example - districts who graduate students at multiple points during the year may have four to six terms. Systemically, the start date of a term dictates when that term’s students and courses are active for teaching staff. This impacts when testing can be done, both paper and online.
• Cycles - This often reflects reporting period within the term. For example, most districts have a two term, three cycle calendar and run their report cards every 6 weeks, with semester and final exams.
• Reporting calendars do not need to be accurate. It is best practice to have no gaps for weekends or holidays. However, make sure the start of the second (and subsequent terms if applicable) are accurate.
• Teachers will be able to see their new courses and students as soon as the new SIS data is imported for the new year (regardless of the first day in the calendar). They will also have access to their final term data into the summer automatically, regardless of the last day on the calendar. This was updated in the summer of 2018 to make things easier for districts.

Creating your calendars

• Create a new calendar wizard will walk you through either creating or editing your instructional calendar
• The + to the left of the instructional calendar will open the Reporting calendars 
• When you click Create a New Calendar, the Wizard will walk you through creating Instructional calendar and a new Reporting calendar.
• You are only given three choices for breaking down terms and cycles within the wizard. If you don’t need a calendar with these term/cycle options, you can delete this reporting calendar later and remake the calendar to match the format you need.
• The first reporting calendar is automatically linked to every campus within the district. If you have campuses on different reporting calendars, you will need to manually create (click New Reporting Calendar with the Instructional Calendar selected) and assign the correct reporting calendar to the campus.