Synergy News You Can Use

School year 2017-2018 will be another collection year for reporting 18 months from now.  How can you improve your collection process now that the 2015-2016 collection year has ended?

I think the biggest improvements can be made in the area of Discipline, followed by staff data, and lastly the areas of tests and attendance.

How can you improve in these area?  Here are some suggestions for each area. 

1. Discipline Incidents
   1. Setup and use the Discipline violation, motivation and disposition codes.  Using these codes will make life easier for the reporting of DIRS and CRDC. 
   2. Run your DIRS extract monthly and correct any errors.  This will make the reporting at the end of the school year much easier.  You will not have to remember a specific incident that occurred nine months earlier.
   3. Decide how you are going to code your Harassment and Bullying violations.  Remember the CRDC will want counts of these based on five items: Gender, Ethnicity, Religion, Sexual Orientation and Disability.
   4. Properly coding your incidents within Synergy will make life easier for the next administrator that takes over the job.  We were asked the question: where does my school/district maintain their discipline records?  Our answer is, if not in Synergy, we do not know.
2. Staff
   1. Always enter the hire date for each new staff person.
   2. Properly code their staff type (Teacher, Admin, Counselor, Nurse, Office … )
   3. For licensed staff, be sure to get and enter their File Folder number on the Staff view.
   4. Enter their Years of Educational Service – annually this can be incremented by clicking the button via the District Setup view within Synergy.
   5. Don’t forget to review the Staff FTE values, especially if you have staff that are shared among multiple buildings.
   6. When Staff leave, be sure to remove their assignment record via the Staff view / Schools tab.  This will mean that staff must not have any sections assigned to them in the mass scheduling or scheduling areas and staff can no longer be assigned to groups.
3. Tests
   1. CRDC folks want to know about the ACT, SAT and AP tests that students take.  If you offer these tests to students then record the results within Synergy.  Most of these tests can be imported very easily into Synergy with a simple properly formatted text file or excel file.
4. Attendance
   1. Elementary sites usually don’t have many issues with this area, but a lot of sites that use period attendance forget to code the all-day code on students.  Fortunately there is mass change which will allow you to populate this field if executed properly.  The mass change can even be scheduled to run by itself.

PLEASE Note:  Our payroll and finance departments are working with their software developers to provide your staff with reports that are needed concerning staff attendance, salaries and expenses for those areas of the CRDC report.

If you follow most of our suggestions then the reporting of this data will be easier and you will finish sooner.