Teachers are cleaning out their desks. Students are clearing out their lockers. Refrains of “no more pencils, no more books…” float through the hallways. It must be time for End of Year!

The End-of-Year, or EOY, service is an opportunity to clean up your Constituent Manager and LMS data in preparation for the new school year. We recommend it for all our schools, but it is especially vital for schools with a student information system (SIS) integration or those that use Finalsite Learn.

Scheduling your EOY service is as easy as picking a date and submitting a ticket, and in this blog we’ll do our best to demystify any questions you might have about the EOY ticket form. New form fields appear depending on your answers to the previous questions, making this a choose-your-own-adventure of a service request.

After selecting “Schedule End-of-Year Services” from the dropdown menu, the first option you have to choose is whether your Constituent Manager, LMS, or both require attention. Almost everyone should select the Constituent Manager option, and we’ll go over the questions on that form here.

Do you sync data from a third party student information system? This question is asking if you have an integration with an SIS, such as Veracross. That will greatly affect how the EOY service proceeds. If you select yes, the follow-up question “When is your rollover scheduled with your student information system?” appears. It’s important that your EOY service take place after your SIS data is rolled over. If your school’s answer to this question is more complicated than yes or no, select “Other” and provide details in the Description box above.

Do you have student profiles in Constituent Manager? If not, this form just got a lot easier! Student data is one of the biggest areas to deal with in the EOY process, and answering yes to this question triggers a lot more questions about how your student data should be handled.

• Move remaining students up a grade level? Hopefully, most of your students are graduating to the next grade in the coming school year. If their current grade is a part of their student profile, you’ll want to make sure that grade information is up to date. When you choose yes, the system will ask you to “Please list your grade levels in order (youngest to oldest).” This may seem like a silly question if your grades are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, but some schools are more complicated! After your EOY service is completed, you can go back and manually adjust the grade levels for students who aren’t progressing.

• How should your graduating students be handled? This question comes with three options: “Move to Alumni Role,” “Permanently Delete,” or “Other.” If you have the alumni role, this is the best way to preserve students’ data and their portal login and allow them to continue to engage with your site and your school. (If you don’t already have this in your contract, speak with your Client Success representative to find out how to get it.) If you don’t have this role, you may want to have your graduating students moved to the “Public User” role. This is more limited than a traditional role, but it will still allow former students to access the website. If you’re more concerned with just cleaning house, you may opt to permanently delete these constituents instead. Keep in mind that this data will not be recoverable!

• Delete withdrawn students in bulk? Withdrawn students are different from graduating students because they aren’t technically alumni. You may not want to delete them entirely, though. In that case, choose “Other” and describe what you’d like to have happen in the “Description” field at the top.

• Delete Alert Subscriptions for Graduating Students? This step is a courtesy for your newly minted Alumni (or Public Users), who probably won’t be quite as invested in the school’s news of the day once they’re no longer students. You can request to delete their subscriptions in bulk so that they don’t continue to receive email or text alerts for events, news items, or posts. If you’re opting to delete graduated students instead of moving them into a different role, their subscriptions will automatically be deleted at that point.

• Import new student information from a datasheet? As well as students leaving the school this year, you’ve got new students arriving at the school next year! If you don’t have an integration, and you don’t want to add all these new constituents to Constituent Manager by hand, then a datasheet is the way to go. The datasheet for students and their parents, along with instructions for how to use it, is available in our Help Center. You don’t have to have this finalized before you submit your EOY request -- you have until your service date to work on it.

Do you have parent profiles in Constituent Manager? We’re done with student data, and now we’re moving on to parent data. These questions will all seem eerily familiar if you’ve just filled out the student profiles questions.

• How should parents of graduated students be handled? If Alumni Relative is an available role for you, use that. Otherwise, you can make parents Public Users or delete them.

• Delete Parents of Withdrawn Students in Bulk? You may want to delete these parents to keep your Constituent Manager clean and uncluttered.

• Delete Alert Subscriptions for Parents Who No Longer Have Children at the school? Just like their children, parents may no longer have the same level of interest in news, events, and posts from the school.

• Import new parent information from a datasheet? The worksheet for parent data is also in the file linked above, as well as a worksheet to define the relationships between students and parents.

Select available service date. You’re done with the questions! Now for the actual scheduling. As long as you make your request early, you should have a wide range of dates to choose from. But hurry! There are a limited number of slots available for each day to ensure that our EOY team has enough time to handle the amount of work required. If you use an integration, make sure to choose a date after your SIS has rolled over to the new year.

Once you’ve selected a date and submitted the form, all that’s left to do is finalize your datasheets (if necessary) and wait for your day of service. A member of the EOY team will contact you on that day with more information.

Ready for more strategies and best practices to make your EOY process as smooth and productive as possible? Join Sam and Keegan next Tuesday for a live webinar, End-Of-Year Strategies to Make for a Less Stressful Fall.