Updating Enrollments

[William Backman]

Now that we are coming up for air after certifying our October counts, how are schools handing the day to day changes to enrollments?  Are you only updating IC, and then doing uploads to Synergy, or are you manually making changes in both IC and Synergy?

--

Will Backman
Director of Technology
Kennebec Valley Consolidated Schools - AOS92.org
Vassalboro - Waterville - Winslow

"The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed.." –William Gibson

[Melissa]

For exiting students, we are exiting in IC, then going into Synergy to exit.  We just learned that if it's a high school student with a concurrent enrollment at VOC, that we have to contact VOC to have them exit the concurrent enrollment before we can go into Synergy to exit the primary enrollment.   For new students, we are using the uploads.  Have yet to determine frequency needed.   Thinking just before quarterly deadlines and EPS.  I also am wondering what others are doing, particularly with how frequently folks are going to be uploading.  

[Wallace, Andrew]

manual here in SoPo

---

From: maineicu...@googlegroups.com [maineicu...@googlegroups.com] on behalf of William Backman [wbac...@aos92.org]
Sent: Friday, December 15, 2017 8:15 AM
To: MaineICU...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Updating Enrollments

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MaineICUsersGroup" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to MaineICUsersGr...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[Nancy Embry]

Combo here; some manual updates for things like SpEd changes, and full

upload for new students.

--

You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MaineICUsersGroup" group.

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to MaineICUsersGroup+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.

For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

--

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Nancy Embry
Data Systems Manager
Kittery School Department
207 439-2572  Ext. 108

nem...@kitteryschools.com

[Sam Iggulden]

I was recently contacted by a charter school to exit a kid in Synergy, so they could pick 'em up... and I did the exit manually, but that prompted me to follow up with a full set if uploads.

However, in November I had only manually set our Alt Assessment flags in Synergy (i.e. for the sake of expediency, I set flags in Synergy but failed to set the new Alt Assessment flag in IC at the same time).  So my SpEd upload wiped out Alt Assessment flags on any Alt Assessment kid who didn't have an upload error.

The scary part is that a quarter of my Alt Assessment flags didn't get wiped out, meaning there was some kind of upload failure on those kids... I suspect most of those failures were due to mismatched dates, where I know I had to manually mess with SpEd dates to get stuff counting properly back in October. So that means that any time I do a set of file uploads, I know a large portion of students won't get updated due to some manual hack I had to do for 10/1 reporting... 

So the question is - do I bother fixing the upload errors?  (i.e. by manually syncing the dates between the two databases so that future uploads will work for all students. Sounds tedious... I think I'd rather poke my eye out with a hot stick)

I did just spend an hour manually fixing the Alt Assessment flags in Synergy (and also in IC this time) - because that is due today and is kind of important.  Note that I did not fix IC and then do an upload because I don't trust the upload process enough to not break something else.

We also had 92 enrollment upload errors (from around 3400+ total records), and from going through enrollment errors in October, I know that some of these matter, but probably most of them don't.  There really needs to be a way of filtering out the important errors from the meaningless ones.  And at this stage I'm not ready to spend a day or so chasing those down, only to have to do it all again in a few weeks when other stuff gets out of sync.  And now that we've signed of on 10/1, I'm not sure there is any point?  When it's time to verify our State Assessment students I'll be sure to clean things up - but I think that'll be the only other time this year because State reporting should only be about 10% of my job (not 70% like it's been so far this year).

I actually think there is a major issue in Synergy's upload logic, because it looks to me that start dates are used as part of a composite uniqueness identifier for many of the record types (i.e. Enrollments, SpEd, FRL, EL and CTE).  So if you update the start date in IC, and then upload that file type - then that update will be seen (by Synergy) as a new record that won't upload because of a date range overlap - as opposed to an update of the start date for the existing record. And if a change in start date accompanies a change in some other data point - then that other data point also fails to upload due to the date range issue...

If I were Synergy, I'd have included a composite key of districtID+stateID+enrollmentID as a true uniqueness identifier for each enrollment upload (and similar for SpEd, FRL etc), where the enrollmentID comes from the whatever district SIS is being used. I can't imagine PowerSchool and Synergy don't have a similar key fields per enrollment. Then the upload process keys on that identifier, rather than a composite of stateID+StartDate.

[Nancy Embry]

Makes great sense...do they have any?!

I kept a workbook of errors, and throw new ones onto it's appropriate starter

sheet, and compare them, and ignore the ones that align perfectly, because

those are the ones I've already decided to ignore.

Rinse, repeat.

Pain, but better than researching the same old tired ones, every time.

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MaineICUsersGroup" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to MaineICUsersGroup+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.