Setting up filters

Overview

Filters allow you to determine what types of events should sync to calendars and who should be included in those events. Event-level filters control which events are synced based on event properties, while attendee-level filters determine which students and faculty are added as guests on those events. You can always change these filters later and re-sync, and you may want to adjust them while in pilot mode to see their effects firsthand.

How to Set Up Filters

Setting Up Event-Level Filters:

1. Configure Date Range:
   • Once data has been obtained from your SIS, SchoolCal runs a diff process which looks for events that have changed since the last sync
   • Choose your date range option:
     • "Only Future Dates" (recommended) - Syncs all events from today forward
     • "From today to cutoff date" (recommended) - Syncs events from today to a specific end date (useful for syncing only first semester)
     • "Start and end (inclusive)" - Includes past events, which likely haven't changed and will slow the sync process
   • Note: This filter is helpful if you have a very large number of current classes. Google has an event creation limit of 100,000 at a time.
2. Select School Levels:
   • Choose which school levels should have their classes synced
   • Important: Selecting "All School" or "Entire School" alone does not mean all classes will sync - if only "All School" is selected, only classes with the school level of "All School" will sync
   • To sync all classes, all listed school levels must be selected
3. Choose Course Types:
   • Specify whether classes of all course types will sync or only certain ones
   • Your view will vary depending on your SIS

Setting Up Attendee-Level Filters:

1. Configure Grade Levels:
   • Specify which grade levels of students should be included as event attendees
   • Options include:
     • Selecting all grades - All students will be added to events
     • Selecting specific grades (e.g., 9-12) - Only those grade levels will be added as attendees and receive events on their calendars
     • Selecting "Do not include students" - Events will be created with only faculty listed as attendees
   • Note: If you limit syncing to certain grades, students outside that range will not appear as attendees even if they're enrolled in the same class
2. Select Faculty Roles:
   • Specify which faculty members should be included as event attendees based on the class_permission_role type they've been assigned in a class (depending upon your SIS)
   • This filter allows you to control which faculty roles appear in the event guest list

Additional Info

Date Range Use Cases:

When launching SchoolCal to your community, you may want to sync only a couple weeks or a month of events initially. This makes your first school-wide sync occur faster so you can quickly verify that the sync works as expected. You can then sync again with a date further in the future, or sync all future events.

For semester-specific syncing, set a cutoff date for the end of the first semester, then change back to "Only Future Dates" once your second semester classes have been scheduled.

Faculty Roles Granularity:

Faculty roles provide granular control over what events sync for employees. For example, if you want both academic classes and athletic programs to sync for students, but only academic responsibilities to sync for faculty, you can:

• Use the event filter to select academic and athletic programs
• Select only "Primary Teacher," "Teacher's Aide," and "Additional Teacher" within the faculty roles filter
• This would sync only teaching responsibilities for someone who is both a teacher and a coach, but would sync both academic and athletic events for students

The faculty roles filter can also limit specific roles from appearing in guest lists. For instance, if you use a role like "Other" for non-teaching observers of a class, you can exclude that role from appearing as attendees.