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:

• What is the last day for students to be in school?
• Are you using HMH products for summer school?
• Do you have any year-round schools?
• When are teachers out of school and grades submitted?
• When are students promoted to the new school year?
• Set the dates for when you plan to stop the SIS feed.
• Set the dates for when your SIS roster data will be loaded and ready for the new school year.
• Set the date for when students and teachers are back in school and when they expect to use the digital system.

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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:

1) Talk to your Teachers and Administrators about the data they want to be retained vs. what data they want Exported. ThinkCentral has an admin level export. Holt McDougal Online and Ed: Your Friend in Learning require the teacher to export the reports they deem necessary.

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.

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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:

• Having the school year in your class names to help differentiate from current year classes moving forward.
• When rostering using SFF or OneRoster 1.0 .csv, only upload active classes for the current school year to HMH systems and teacher users can reactivate classes from previous years using tools in the ThinkCentral or Holt McDougal Online to “include inactive classes”. Note: When rostering with SFF, all class data is considered current year.

If you plan to move or purge previous school year data from your HMH systems, please do the following:

For ThinkCentral admins:

• Run an assessment .csv export (See Online Help for details)
• Run usage reports and store as .csv

For Holt McDougal Online admins:

• As administrator exports are not possible in Holt McDougal Online, have teachers export classroom/student reports and save on a secure district location
• Run usage reports and store as .csv

For Ed: Your Friend in Learning admins:

• As administrator exports are not possible in Ed: Your Friend in Learning, have teachers export classroom/student reports and save on a secure district location
• Run usage reports and store as .csv (new feature, May 2018)

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If you are planning to use SFF to roster for Summer School, HMH recommends:

• Turning off data integration and manually managing data on existing users
• Combining traditional school year data with summer school data. Note: When rostering for Summer School, please be sure to include ALL roster data (Summer School and traditional year data) to avoid having traditional year data inactivated.
• If you plan to integrate your Student Information System (SIS) and HMH products for summer school, then you could mass inactivate data from the traditional school year and your teachers may wish to export data they wish to retain.

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As you look ahead to rostering for next year, here are some key things to consider before closing out the current school year:

• Do you plan to purge data? If so, please see our Online Help guidance on how to do so.
• Be sure to plan a rostering schedule that accommodates:
1. When teachers and students need to access content
2. When teachers may have training or need to prepare their classrooms in the weeks ahead of the new year
3. Student Information System (SIS) constraints (i.e. when will the SIS scheduling be complete?
• Do you plan to switch to using Single File Format (SFF) to roster? Receive guidance on this page in Online Help.
• If switching to SFF for rostering next year, you will want to link the accounts between your HMH systems. See this page in Online Help for more information.
• If you will be rostering new HMH programs that use Ed: Your Friend in Learning, please see this page in Online Help for more guidance.
• If you plan to use automation to roster (i.e. use a script to send data files to the HMH SFTP site), then please see this page in Online Help.
• Plan to clear or inactivate administrator accounts that are no longer needed.
• Review updated Online Help.

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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.

Download 2018 End of Year Checklist

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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.

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Districts with locally-installed SAM Servers should turn off the Auto Import Utility during the last week of school (districts hosting their SAM installations in the HMH Data Center should stop sending files to be imported). This will prevent the servers from sending empty data sets once classes end, which could corrupt data in CSV exports and final reports.

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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.

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Districts or schools that plan to import student data for the next school year will change grade levels in the student import file as long as the SIS_ID remains the same. Districts and schools that do not plan to import student data 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:

• Promote students a single grade while leaving them in their current classes in the SmartBar. This could be useful if an entire class is being promoted together, but staying together as a group.
• Remove students from all of their current classes in the SmartBar, but leave them in the SAM installation, accessible with the Manage Inactive Accounts function. See the SAM Data Management Manual for more information.
• Remove students from the SAM installation entirely by preparing a transfer file you can use to create accounts for students in a different SAM installation. Students removed from the installation are also unenrolled from SAM Suite programs, freeing up licenses associated with that student.

See the Student Promotions section of the SAM Data Management Manual for instructions on using the Manage Student Promotions Wizard.

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Perform the database backup last so it incorporates all aggregated data and student promotions. It is a good practice to perform this backup manually to ensure that all settings and data are included. See the Backing Up and Restoring the Database section of the SAM Data Management Manual for instructions on performing a manual backup. Districts that host their SAM Server in the HMH Data Center automatically have their data backed up.

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The Clear School Data function in SAM places all students, teacher, and classes in a school in Inactive Accounts, allowing for school data to be changed. HMH strongly recommends backing up the school database before using the Clear School Roster function.

From the School profile on the Roster tab, click Clear School Roster. With the roster cleared, click Edit School Profile and enter new school year dates for the school.

To import the 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.

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Districts or schools may choose to manually update their student, teacher, and class information rather than using the Manage Student Promotions Wizard. 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 the 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.

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If you need to remove the SAM installation from the server, the server must be decommissioned. To clear SAM from the server:

• Follow the uninstall instructions in the SAM Server Uninstall folder.
• Manually remove the SAMServer.properties file from the operating system. On a Windows-based server, this file is located in the Windows\System32 folder; on a Macintosh-based server, the file is located in the Libraries/Preferences folder.

Once the SAM Server is uninstalled and the SAMServer.properties file is removed, the server is clear of SAM components and can be repurposed. For more information on decommissioning servers, contact the Intervention Product Help Desk at 1-800-283-5974

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HMH continues to expand support and functionality for the Simple File Format (SFF) rostering format. We strongly encourage our customers who aren’t already using SFF to roster to consider making the switch.

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• Using one template to roster across all three HMH Core online learning systems: ThinkCentral, Holt McDougal Online, and Ed: Your Friend in Learning
• The ability to validate rostering files which can be helpful when building extracts for summer school, changing student information systems (SIS), or incorporating future SFF improvements.
• Better alignment to SIS
• SIS functions (e.g. adds, updates, moves/transfers, etc.) are easier to execute

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For more details on these upcoming rostering enhancements, see our latest ThinkCentral and Holt McDougal Online Feature Release Guides.

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