CTA Synergy Blog - Scheduling Corner

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Scheduling Corner

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11/18/24

Scheduling Trainings Have Been Posted

Here at CTA we are already planning for the 2025-2026 school year. We have updated our website with Scheduling trainings.Feel free to register via the link below.

https://sites.google.com/cascadetech.org/synergyblogsite/training

We are offering three trainings this year:

Course Request Training - For secondary schools. This training includes how to input course requests manually, in masse, and via online forecasting. Trainings are available from February to mid April.

Mass Scheduling Training - For Secondary schools. This is the second training in the sequence. It includes how to create an option set, create sections inside of an option set, and have the system schedule students into those sections based on their course requests. Course Requests are required to use this system. This training also includes how to use Schedule Board. Trainings are available from mid March to mid June.

Elementary Scheduling - For Elementary schools. How to create sections, and link homeroom sections to specialist sections (example: PE and Music). Trainings are available in early June.

Important: You will need to have the new year rollover completed (access to the 2025-2026 school year focus) at your school before you can do the things talked about in these training sessions. You are welcome to attend the training before your new year rollover is completed, but the tasks discussed will require access to the 2025-2026 school year. Please ask your District IT when they plan to have the New year Rollover completed.

8/1/22

2023 Scheduling Updates

We have recently updated Synergy to a 2023 version. With that came some updates. Below is a list of some of the updates that I think may affect the scheduling process.

There are changes to how the School and Year Focus looks. In the past, the entire background of the screen would change colors depending on what year you were looking at. This is no longer the case, now just the upper portion of the screen and the area around the focus changes colors. Also the History area of the Tree now remembers what school and year you were looking at. So if you use this you could be switching focus years and schools. You will want to keep a careful eye on your focus if you use that feature.

There is now a “Move” option on the Schedule Request screen. This allows you to move course requests between a Global Alternate and a Primary Course request with ease. This will be useful when you find a student with too many or too few course requests. You can simply move some of the course requests to the other category.

Non-binary gender is now included in the Total Students calculation on the STU408 – Class List and STU408.L reports.

If your school uses Course Requests, and shares the same District Course with other schools, you can now use the School Course Screen to indicate whether you want that Course to be included in the online forecasting process or not for your school. Previously schools could make it so that a particular course did not show up in course requests in any school (via the District Course screen), but now you can decide that on a per school basis on the School Course screen. This is a great option for schools that use the same District Course at multiple schools.

On the District Course Screen there is now a “Duplicate Request” dropdown option. This will need to be used for schools that are using Online Forecasting (where students input their course Requests in StudentVUE). The dropdown option manages whether or not a student can request the same Course more than once in ParentVUE/StudentVUE. The default blank option makes it so students can only request a course once. Once that course has been requested, it no longer shows up again as an option to request a second time. The Reject All Duplicates option works the same way as the default. Schedule All Duplicates means that a student can request the same course request multiple times. If you are using Online Forecasting, for any courses that you want a student to be able to request multiple times it is important that you navigate to that Course’s District Course screen and select that option.