In today’s post, I want to share a pattern that a number of our customers use to organize their classes in NeatSchool. It suits best schools where the classes have a certain duration. The duration is usually tied to the academic year but can also be a quarter, a month etc.

I will illustrate the pattern with an example. Let’s say you have three classes: 1st grade, 2nd grade and 3rd grade and they are organized by academic year. Then, when you start, create three classes for the current academic year. For our example, let’s assume that the academic year is 2016-2017. Then each class should be named: “1st grade 2016-2017”, “2nd grade 2016-2017”, “3rd grade 2016-2017”. Go ahead and enroll/assign students as shown in the NeatSchool tutorials.

Now towards the end of the academic year, you need to plan for the next year. At that point you will create three new classes: “1st grade 2017-2018”, “2nd grade 2017-2018” & “3rd grade 2017-2018”. You will then add these classes to the records of the students who plan to attend these classes effective immediately.  You can quickly and easily do that by selecting multiple students and use the following menu entry:

This way you can check all the rosters and see how the classes for the next academic year will look like. An additional advantage is that you can now send e-mails that target a specific class in a specific year, for the next academic year, but for past academic years, even years later.

Since classes can belong to one or more Departments, you can create a Department that corresponds to the academic year and add all the classes for that academic year to that Department.

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