A successful launch of the 2020-2021 school year starts at the end of the 2019-2020 school year. The HMH team is here to help with suggestions, checklists, and guidance for how to take steps at the end of this school year that will help ensure a smooth back to school experience.
By filling out your dates on a calendar, you can layout a project plan on what action to take when and how best to communicate that plan. For example, if the current school year ends on May 15th and your district is planning to use HMH products for summer school, then you would not want to clear the site and load new information until after summer school is over.
Here are some questions and tips to help you plan a schedule:
You will want to gather all your organizational feedback before the end of the school year. Once staff members leave for the summer, you will be unable to gather any necessary feedback or assist in their data needs.
Here are some tips and questions to help you communicate with your users:
2) Share your schedule with stakeholders. Often, teachers come back in the fall and may start manually entering classes and rosters, which can cause issues if you plan to import files. Consider implementing data editing restrictions if you are planning data automation.
3) Do you want to purge (start empty) or simply mass inactivate all data? If so, please continue to Storing or Purging Data.
Though doing so is not necessary, some districts and schools prefer to move school year data at the end of the year from their HMH systems to a central reporting store or prefer to purge such data from the systems entirely.
If you plan to retain previous school year data in ThinkCentral, Holt McDougal Online, or Ed: Your Friend in Learning, we recommend:
If you plan to move or purge previous school year data from your HMH systems, please do the following:
For ThinkCentral admins:
For Holt McDougal Online admins:
For Ed: Your Friend in Learning admins:
If you are planning to use SFF to roster for Summer School, HMH recommends:
As you look ahead to rostering for next year, here are some key things to consider before closing out the current school year:
End of Year Rollover Checklist provide guidance for how to take steps at the end of
this school year that will make rostering next year as easy as possible.
See the SAM End-of-Year checklist in the SAM Technical Implementation Guide on the Product Support website for complete instructions on SAM End-of-Year tasks.
Districts uploading rosters via our Auto-Import utility or through a direct API connection with your Student Information System (SIS) should pause the automatic imports during the last week of school.
This will prevent the servers from sending empty data sets once classes end, which could corrupt data in CSV exports and final reports.
For help in pausing the import process, please contact the Intervention Product Help Desk at 1-800-283-5974, or email edtech.techsupport@hmhco.com
Student data should be exported at the end of the school year, before starting summer school programs and prior to preparing the database for the coming school year. SAM users may use the Export function to export student roster and performance data as CSV files. See the Data Export section of the SAM Data Management Manual on the Product Support website for instructions on exporting data through SAM.
Districts or schools that are using the manual .csv import process, the Auto-Import Utility, or a direct API connection with their SIS will have their students promoted automatically as part of the normal import process as long as the student ID (SIS_ID) remains the same year-to-year.
Districts and schools that do not import student data (either through .csv or an API connection) may use the Manage Student Promotions Wizard to promote large groups without changing every student’s profile in the district database. The Manage Student Promotions Wizard also serves the following functions:
See the Student Promotions section of the SAM Data Management Manual for instructions on using the Manage Student Promotions Wizard.
The Clear School Roster function in SAM places all students, teachers, and classes in each school in Inactive Accounts. This step will unenroll all students from all programs, allows for school data to be changed, and prepares the server for new imports for the next school year.
HMH strongly recommends taking this step only after all end of year processes and summer school classes have been completed. Districts and schools need to run all reports and data exports prior to performing this step, as class associations will not be saved. Student data will not be affected, and will still be associated with the student account.
From each School profile on the Roster tab, click Clear School Roster.
For districts using a .csv import, the Auto-Import Utility, or an API connection, students, teachers, and classes will automatically repopulate when imports resume.
To manually add inactive student, teacher, and class records back into the School profile, click the Manage Inactive Accounts link in the Advanced Settings menu on the School Profile screen and select the accounts to be imported.
See Enrolling and Managing Students Using Student Achievement Manager at the Product Support site for more information on working with Inactive Accounts.
From the School profile on the Roster tab, click Edit School Profile and enter new school year and grading period dates for each school on the SAM Server.
Districts or schools may choose to manually update their student, teacher, and class information rather than using the Manage Student Promotions Wizard or import functions. HMH only recommends this procedure for districts or schools with small SAM installations because of the possibility of introducing errors into student, teacher, or class profiles. Additionally, manual changes may be negated by an import file if your district or school is importing student data. Check with the district or school SAM administrator to determine if manually updating data is necessary.
See Enrolling and Managing Students Using Student Achievement Manager or more information in editing SAM profiles.
Locally installed SAM servers will no longer be supported by HMH as of July, 2020.
If you are still using a local SAM Server, please reach out to your account executive for SAM Server Hosting options. You can find your Account Executive here.
For information and documentation on locally installed SAM Servers, please visit the product support website. https://www.hmhco.com/product-support
To download the final releases of all local SAM installers, click here.
For more information, please contact our Intervention Product Help Desk at 1-800-283-5974, or email at edtech.techsupport@hmhco.com
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