Summer School Site Readiness Checklist

This is a basic annual district/site walk-through and checklist to ensure you are ready for the Summer Session or ESY. Click on any of the links below for detailed instructions.

IMPORTANT: Summer school is designed to be an extension of the school year in Illuminate. A summer session will need to be created for each site that is operating a summer school.

If ESY will be tracked in Illuminate, we recommend setting up a separate ESY school per site type i.e., Elementary ESY, Middle School ESY, High School ESY.

Getting Started-Summer School

Before you dive into setting up your Summer School/ESY, it is important to make sure you understand how Summer School works. Are there multiple periods? Does attendance need to be tracked and reported? Is attendance Hourly/Positive or Daily/Negative? Is Summer School strictly for credit recovery or for enrichment?

The answers to the above questions can change how you approach the setup for your Summer School.

As mentioned above, Summer school is designed to be an extension of the school year and, therefore, should be created as a new session at any existing site that will be offering summer school.

Per school site you must:

1. Create a new Sessions and Terms using Term Manager. The Term should be added as its own unique session that starts after the regular session has ended. Additionally, if your summer session will not be reporting ADA, please Select NON-ADA from the dropdown.

For ESY, after click add Term for your specific ESY sites, click the dropdown that says Yearlong and select Session. Next, provide a name for the term and then click on the Term Type dropdown and select Supplemental Session.

2. Give yourself and staff affiliations with the Summer Session.

3. Create Timeblocks and Timeblock Occurrences (contact us if you would like assistance 'copying over' timeblocks and occurrences at isisupport@illuminateed.net)

4. Complete the school Calendar for the Summer Session.

5. Set Reporting Periods (for attendance reporting periods). Please be sure you are logged into the Summer Session. NOTE: Reporting periods enable you to run specific Attendance reports that may be helpful for your staff.  

6. Set Grading Periods (for gradebooks). Please be sure you are logged into the summer session.

Enrolling in Summer School

After completing your site setup, the next step is to enroll summer school students manually. If there are more than 75 students, please follow the directions below for guidance on how to mass enroll.  

Mass Enroll Students in Summer School

For Mass enrolling, there are 2 options:

Option 1 (Quickest): Using Core Data Import & Validation tool to import enrollment.txt file

Create a tab-delimited text file that matches enrollment.txt file's specifications, required fields, and file name. That information can be found by navigating to the Admin Gear > Data Specifications. For summer school enrollment, you'll need to include the column "Session Type ID," where you will have a value of 2 for all students so that the system recognizes this import for summer session.
Ensure that you have a Core Data Automation Configuration set up that matches the the fields you have included (makes sure all required ones are in your file) as well as the order.
Import that file as a validation only first on the Core Data Import & Validation page. This is very important to ensure you don't import in data that is incorrect before reviewing your results first!
Address any errors that show in your validation log on the Core Data Import Log page.
Once all errors are addressed, return to the Core Data Import & Validation page to import your file!

More information on Core Data Imports can be reviewed on our Processing a One-Time Import help document.

Option 2 (Estimated 3-6 week turnaround time): Submit a file to ISI Support for Database Team request:

Send a file to isisupport@illuminateed.net
The file must contain the following columns: Student ID, Last Name, First Name, Enrollment Site ID: this is the site to be enrolled into, Academic Year, Session Type (i.e. Summer), Grade Level, Enrollment Attendance Program.

Summer School Scheduling

To prepare for Summer School scheduling, check Course master list to ensure summer-related courses are flagged properly. If the course's Session Type is blank under course details your course will be available for Summer and Normal Sessions.

Scheduling Option 1:

Create new Sections for Summer Session using Live Sections. Please be sure you are logged into the Summer Session.
Schedule Students Manually using Schedule 2.0. or the Place Students feature in each section. Please be sure you are logged into the Summer Session.

Scheduling Option 2:

Create Draft Schedule
Create Draft Sections
Edit sections and use Place Students feature to schedule students.
Publish the draft

Summer School Attendance

Set Attendance Programs appropriately for session, course, section, or by student. Review the Attendance Setup Checklist.

Helpful Tips

If Summer School requires hourly positive attendance tracking make sure that all sections at the site are set as hourly positive.

If you have a particularly complex summer school schedule and would like to use our master scheduling tools see our complete help documents.

Support

For assistance or to answer any questions you may have, please do not hesitate to contact us at isisupport@illuminateed.net

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