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Start of School Year Setup

Resume automatic syncing and configure your schedules for the new academic year

Available to all SchoolCal administrators who manage schedule flows.

Overview

At the start of each school year, automatic syncing is paused to prevent inadvertent release of next year's schedules. Once your schedules are published, you'll need to configure your flows and resume automatic syncing to make schedules available via the API and push them to user calendars.

How To Resume Syncing for the New School Year

  1. Log in and load current data
    • Go to go.schoolcal.com and log in with your SchoolCal credentials
    • Click the "Data" tab
    • Hover over the name of your SIS and click the "Load Data" button to ensure you're working with the current year's data
    • For Veracross schools: You may need to update your scopes for your V3 connection; in addition, SchoolCal will not receive meeting times until schedules have been published to the portal.
    • For Blackbaud schools: SchoolCal will not receive meeting times until there is at least one student and one teacher in a class AND the schedule sets have been published to one of the roles that the SchoolCal user has. Note, if you have used SchoolCal multiple years, you may need to add in the "Academic Group Manager" to the roles for your SchoolCal user. It is also a good idea to go ahead and log into Blackbaud as your SchoolCal user so that Blackbaud will not set it as inactive.
  2. Select and configure your flow
    • Click the flow you want to configure
    • Review and update the following settings:
  3. Set your date syncing preferences
    • Select either "Only future dates" or "From today to cutoff date" (if syncing only one semester or quarter). If you are a school with over 1000 students we recommend incremental syncs - first sync "from today to, say, October 31", allow the sync to complete.  Second sync "from today to December 31", allow sync to complete and so on until you have synced (if desired) the entire year.
    • Note: We do not recommend syncing a date range—that option is typically reserved for troubleshooting
    • Review other filters to ensure they include/exclude the correct people, subjects, etc.
    • Required: Use separate flows for students, teachers, and resources (new template options provide greater flexibility). Now is the time to make this switch - before any events have been created.
    • Note: If there is not a compelling reason to exclude a filter, we recommend keeping it checked otherwise you may inadvertently exclude some classes.
    • Click "Save" for each filter section after making changes (each section has its own save button)
  4. Update class exclusions
    • Delete any class exclusions from last year
    • After data has loaded, add back any classes you wish to exclude
    • Why: Internal class IDs change from year to year
  5. Configure block exclusions 
    • You may now exclude specific blocks (for example, lunch blocks). Again, if there is not a compelling reason to exclude them, just leave them checked, especially the "no block" as it captures classes where the times are manually entered.
  6. Adjust event templates
  7. Test with pilot mode (recommended)
    • Put your flow into pilot mode
    • Add a few pilot users
    • Click "Sync Now"
    • Review the resulting calendar events
  8. Enable automatic syncing
    • If satisfied with pilot results, turn off pilot mode (to send to all)
    • Turn on "Automatic syncing"
    • Each night, SchoolCal will pull current data, identify differences, and push changes, additions, or deletions to users' calendars

Please join us for one of our Back To School webinars this summer where we will review these settings, introduce new options now available and end with a Q&A. 

Additional Info

Need assistance? We're happy to schedule a call to help with this process. Email support@schoolcal.com for a scheduling link.