We are back to normal, or maybe it is the new normal (I am not always sure which), and that means our events are back in person and that we are utilizing Veracross calendars more and more each week. Whether that is athletics adding their events or our school-level admins managing back-to-school nights. This has presented great opportunities to try out different things in Veracross, and as you may have guessed from the title, our first opportunity was Back to School Night.
Our back-to-school night is a night where parents get 2.5 hours to meet with each of their child's teachers and hear a short blurb about what is going on in class and in the school at large. The parents follow their students' block schedules from Block 1 to Block 8, meeting with each of the respective teachers during that time. I was informed about back-to-school night and what it might entail and had to get to work to figure out a way to accommodate everyone, teachers, students, parents, and admin - fun!
First, I looked at leveraging the Parent/Teacher Conferences module in Veracross - maybe the recent enhancements would accommodate our needs? It did not, our back-to-school night schedule is set, meaning, parents do not sign up for specific slots with a teacher. Because there was not an easy way of adding parents/students to parent/teacher conference records in Axiom it had to be scrapped.
Second, we looked at running a mail merge, either in Veracross or externally, but ran into the issue of data existing in columns as opposed to rows. So we scrapped the mail merge plan.
In both of these options, I tried bending Veracross to my will, but sometimes Veracross is just too, well, Veracross for any tricks or hacks.
Finally, it came to me, the Student Daily Schedule and Group Events. The Student Daily Schedule "displays all of a student’s schedule data for a particular day, unifying potentially disparate information about class schedules, athletic and events, transportation arrangements, and more in a single view". With the SDS, Student Daily Schedule, and group events, we could associate Veracross system groups based on classes with group events, and set the Group Member visibility flag to 'Yes'
Note: The Veracross class-based groups include all students and teachers, meaning the events associated with groups would appear on all calendars (Parent/Teacher/Student)
So, we have the means, group events, and the SDS, now all that was left was figuring out to execute the plan. For us, that's over 800 parents, 400 classes, 70 teachers, and 1 Database Administrator.
So how do we get this done? How do we get this done without extreme amounts of manual updating and review?? The Veracross import tool, of course!
Essentially, we had to create an event for every one of our classes and associate the correct class group with the primary group field on each of the events. Sounds like a lot, it is and it is not? To create the import I started with the data already in Veracross. I began with a 'Find Classes' query as each of the classes would eventually be a group event. In the 'Find Classes' query I filtered by block using the 'Class Schedule Information' function field (I highly recommend using the 'x' schedule function fields, they have so many different applications, whether that be class-based, student-based, or even teacher based).
From here I was able to bring in the necessary fields for my import, the Class ID and Class Description fields for the event description and for the primary group associated with the events (the class group names coming from the class ID and description, e.g. the system generated group for the Advisory 9.7 class description is: 'Adv9.7: Advisor Period-9'). Using shift + command + C (helpful documentation), I was able to copy the data from Veracross and move it to a shared google sheet the Admin team and I referenced.
Note: you can bring in any fields you might want to include in the description, i.e. TEACHER:Salutation, if you want to include more information in the group description. Our event description read: Class ID: Class Descriptions - Teacher Salutation, and all that took was a little concatenating in Excel or Google Sheets.
After the Google sheet was completed and reviewed, we were ready for import. We imported the events. Initially, the events were set to 'No' for visibility on all calendars. The admin team and I reviewed the events, edited the odd group event that would not meet, and published a subset of events to specific test parent portals (to publish all we had to do was update the Group Members visibility flag to 'Yes'). After confirming that everything worked as expected we published to everyone.
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Note: An additional benefit to leveraging group membership is that the group associated with the event reflected the add/drops that had taken place that day when we ran the 'Refresh Group Membership' procedure on the system homepage. Meaning, at the end of the day every group event reflected the student's actual enrollment.
Now what about the practicalities, a calendar in Veracross is great, but not if no one is aware of how to access it. To inform our parents we did a number of things:
1. Emails (which go unread), we sent out a number of communications to parents with screenshots of how they are going to access their BTSN schedule.
2. We had our advisors review their own schedules to ensure they look accurate.
3. We had our advisors work with their advisees by taking screenshots and sharing them with their parents.
4. The night of, we had staff onsight who could help facilitate any user account issues parents may have.
We are happy to report that there were no issues outside of parents not knowing how to log in, everything went off without a hitch.
Now your back-to-school night may not operate in this manner, so what were our takeaways?
There are lots of great uses for the student daily schedule and leveraging group events to display complex sets of data to parents in a digestible way.
Be flexible, we walked into this process expecting to use the Parent Teacher Conference module and had to pivot to the student daily schedule.
Combine tech and human solutions, use your advisors and teachers to review data, and help communicate information to students.
As much as possible, attempt to leverage data that is already in Veracross, system groups, and the like.
This was how we managed our Back to School Night in Veracross, if you have done anything similar or used PTC to great effect, leave a comment, I would love to hear what other Veracross schools are doing!