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SIS 2000+ Prepare for Midyear Scheduling

While most schools will schedule students for the entire school year, some schools want to schedule one term at a time, while others will schedule the entire year and then reschedule the second (or subsequent) term(s).

The "scheduling" of students in SIS 2000+ is accomplished in three general phases:

1. Collect course requests from students and store them in the Course Request Editor.
2. Use the Master Schedule Editor to create a Master Schedule based on course requests vs. resources.
3. Using the Student Loader, batch "load" all the students into course sections in the Master Schedule based on their course requests (or schedule a single student at a time using the Student Schedule Editor.)

In the last step of this process, the Student Loader application will recalculate all student schedules each time it is run, based on course requests vs. the Master Schedule and the various rules applied, etc. The Student Loader itself cannot be directed to schedule a specific term to the exclusion of other terms in the same track because the Loader must, by necessity, erase all previous student schedules each time it recalculates - with the exception of schedule records that are prescheduled or "locked down".

In order to schedule one term at a time, the Prepare for Midyear application provides a mechanism for "locking down", as a batch, student schedule records in a previous term (including the requests that are referenced by these schedule records) so that subsequent terms can be scheduled without affecting the previous term.

The user specifies a track and then a term to be scheduled. The choice of term will be limited to those terms that are not flagged as progress reports and do not have a trmstart of value of "1" (these are attributes of Term codes as defined in the Table Editor during the configuration of SIS 2000+. See Mark Reporting, Step 1.1, "Set Up Terms Codes Table" for more details). Also excluded are terms containing classes that have attendance data posted for any student.

Once an eligible term is selected to be scheduled the Midyear process will determine the existing schedule records to be locked down using an internal, three-step process as follows:

1. All "non-progress report" terms that precede the selected term are determined (according to their trmstart attribute defined in the Table Editor, i.e., they must have a trmstart value less than the trmstart value of the chosen term. The trmstart field is used to define the chronological order of the terms. See Mark Reporting, Step 1.1, "Set Up Terms Codes Table" for more details.)
2. All sections that meet in the preceding non-progress terms (i.e. have a meeting time record for a preceding term) are determined. These sections will be flagged by turning off (deselected, set to zero) the Scheduling Course? field (isschedule) in their Section/Segment attributes. (See master Schedule Editor, Sec. 3, Schedule Classes, Step 3.1.2 - Edit Course Section/Segment Attributes for more details.)
3. All student schedule records for one of these flagged sections are then flagged internally with a "Prescheduled" code in their Schedule Entry Code field (escdchgyc), thus locking them from being affected by subsequent Student Loader operations. The remaining student requests (i.e. those that are not referenced by a "locked" schedule record) will then be scheduled around the locked schedules when the Student Loader is run.
   
   
   

1. Open the Prepare for Midyear Scheduling application.
This application can be found in the Enrollment program module. Click on the Prepare for Midyear icon button to open the program (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1

2. Select Track and Term

• First select a Track to be scheduled.
• Then select a term to schedule in the First Term to be Scheduled field. Only eligible terms will be available for selection. If the school has more than two terms, select the first term of the remaining terms in the range (in chronological order). After the Midyear process is run, all terms previous to this "first term" selection will be locked down and all terms following this "first term" will be available for scheduling.
  
  
  

3. Process

3.1 Initiate
Click on the Process command button to start processing (or Quit to exit the application without processing).

3.2 Continue
A message box will appear (Fig. 2) listing the term codes of the terms that will be prescheduled. Answer "Yes" to continue or "No" to abort.


Fig. 2

Note:
When the midyear process is initiated, more than one term code may be listed to be prescheduled in this message box, depending on 1) how the district has defined term codes in the Table Editor, 2) which of those term codes are used in the selected track - as defined in the Track Editor, and 2) how many terms have been defined for a school year.

For instance, when preparing to schedule "Semester 2" in a two semester track, a mark reporting term named "Both Semesters (AS)" may be listed for prescheduling as well as a scheduling term named "Semester 1 (S1)" because both terms have the criteria that causes their schedule records to be locked down. In another example, when preparing to schedule Semester 3 in a three term track, Semester 1 and Semester 2 will likely be listed for prescheduling.

4. Schedule the selected term(s).
This can be done in batch fashion via the Student Loader. Individual scheduling is or editing is done via the Student Schedule Editor.

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