Ann Arbor Public Schools: Prep for Next Year

Preparing Your Records for Next Year

PowerSchool uses two screens to describe a student's enrollment from one year to the next: Scheduling Setup and Transfer Info. Which one(s) you use will depend on where the student's record is now and where it will be next year.

For students who are active and returning next year, PowerSchool will automagically update the Transfer Info page when the students are rolled up in August.
For any student who has exited or will not be returning, the Transfer Info page must be edited for Child Accounting/State Reporting and the Scheduling Setup page should be edited to move the record to Archive.

There are three basic 'scenarios':

already exited students and/or those who will not be returning
students leaving your building at the end of this year but who will return in another AAPS building next year
students who will return to you next year

For students who have exited already or are leaving the districtat the end of the year:

Verify first that a valid Exit Code and Exit Date are entered in Transfer Info. Use the Exit Comments field to note details such as where the student moved. Keep the exit date set to the default exit date per Child Accounting.
Next, go to the Scheduling Setup screen for the student and increment the Next Grade Level, set the Next School Indicator to Archive and unclick the the Schedule This Student checkbox.

Current students changing buildings over summer:

Edit Scheduling Setuppage. There are three fields that need to be edited:
- increment the Next Grade Level
- set the Next School Indicator to their destination building
- click the box next to Schedule This Student.

For students who are active in the current year and will return to your building next year:

You will be editing the Scheduling Setup screen to show where the student will go next year (Next School Indicator) and in what grade they will be (Next Year Grade). Since this will be the majority of your students, you will want to use mass changes to edit the fields as opposed to having to set each record by hand. Following are some examples of what to search for and what to mass edit.

Make sure you are in the current school year and do a search like this:
sched_nextyeargrade=0

In a perfect world, this should yield NO kids since all kinders should move up a grade next year and there are no kinders in middle or high schoool. In real life, you probably see several kids in a whole buncha different grades. These are all new enrollees who need to have those three particular fields on the Scheduling Setup page modified as described above so that they will behave properly in PowerScheduler.

Let's repeat that same search but add a current grade level and grab just the kids returning, like this:
sched_nextyeargrade=0;grade_level=0;ExitCode=

That would find current kinders. From Functions, choose Student Field Value.

In this screen, you want to tell PowerSchool to change the Sched_NextYearGrade to 1 and submit.

While those records are selected, you can use Student Field Value again to change Sched_Scheduled to 1 and Submit. The 1 means True. These are kids who you would want to be able to see in PowerScheduler and will be active next year.

Because some of your students may already be set to go to a different building for next year, change the search a little to find just the students whose Next_School is not yet set:

sched_nextyeargrade=0;grade_level=0;ExitCode=;Next_School=

Again use Student Field Value to edit the NextSchool field to your School Number and Submit. If you later find out a student is going elsewhere next year, you can adjust the info as needed by hand on the Scheduling Setup page.

Guess what!? Now you get to repeat that process for all but the highest grade level in your buildings (grades 5 and 8 are usually done earliest to accommodate scheduling; 12th grade has different rules described below). If you check and find any kids that whose fields were not set up to fly up to a middle or high school (including the Sched_Scheduled and NextYearGrade fields) you should fix those and alert the receiving school that they may have more incoming kids. [NOTE: Graduates are put in grade 99, given a GR exit code and routed to the Graduated Students building(999999).]

Once the above steps are completed for your building, you can go to PowerScheduler to get an idea of whether your numbers are totting up as you expected.

From the Start Page, choose PowerScheduler.
In the next screen, look for Resources>Students and click.
- At an elementary, you might search
  and click the magnifying glass. That would show a list that includes PK4s as well as the kinders you've entered from roundup. Run the same search for each grade level and check your numbers.
- At secondary buildings, the returned lists should reflect existing students and anyone flagged to transfer to your building using the Next School Indicator field. You can see everybody for the next year by using a search that excludes the kids in the highest grade in the current year, such as sched_nextyeargrade<13