Documentation
This topic assumes you have had an OSP site for at least one year/school year, and includes instructions and directions on how to transition from year to year. Memberships, registrations, positions and programs all have a life cycle, and each needs consideration. For the purpose of this guide, a school PTA site is assumed.
On July 1, OSP will automatically archive the “activity” (defined below) that occurred on your website during the previous school year. All activity is tagged with a particular “school year”. For example, activity that occurs between July 1, 2014 and June 30, 2015 is considered by default to be part of the “2014-2015” school year.
Certain reports only display the activity for the current school year by default. Therefore, on July 1, these reports will appear blank, showing no activity. This is because no activity has yet taken place in the new school year. However, it is possible to customize the report to show the previous school year’s activity, if you need to. To do this, click on filters and choose school year. Choose the school year that you are interested in, and press apply.
In addition, regardless of the exact date on which an activity occurred, you (the administrator) can change the “school year” which that activity is tagged with. Using this technique, for example, an order that was placed on March 13, 2015 can be manually tagged with the “2015-2016” school year, and therefore show up in the default reports after July 1, 2015. To do this, simply click Edit on the specific item (e.g., the order), change the school year dropdown box as necessary, and press Save.
The following are the reports that show “activity” for a given school year:
Articles are also tagged with “school year” and go through the same archiving process. Therefore, after July 1st, your articles list may show blank, even if the expiration dates of articles are past that date. Since articles are often used on the site’s home page, this may cause your home page to appear blank. To re-show some articles, simply follow the steps outlined above for changing the “School Year” articles are tagged with.
OSP does not automatically make any changes to the student database. To guarantee the correct data collection from users, administrators must at least clear grade/teacher information.
Admins need to clear student grade/teacher information as preparation for the new year. Once this information is cleared, the next time a user logs into the site and enters a packet, they will be prompted to update it. Make sure to schedule this only when you want users to start preparing for the new year, purchase a new membership, and update their student’s grade/teacher information.
To do this:
Kids are matched by name, teacher and grade in our Reading Logs. When teacher and grade are reset as part of the year transition, kids will not be able to get into the system to add more minutes. If your school uses Reading Logs over the summer, it is recommended to delay clearing grade & teacher until those programs complete.
Before clearing grade/teacher information, consider whether you want to remove graduating students. This can be done by users themselves when they sign in (assuming they have other students in the school) or by OSP admins.
To do this:
If you have already cleared the grade/teacher information for students, you can still find out what their previous grade was by adding the Previous grade column to the Students reports.
When an OSP site is ready for the new school year, the first time users sign in to the site and enter a packet, they are invited to review their information.
The process of re-joining typically includes:
Users who no longer wish to have an account with the OSP site can delete it from their /Account page.
Determining an inactive account can be challenging. The site maintains a “last sign-in” for each account, that logs the last log-in to the site. A log-in is any time the user visits the site even if their credentials are stored. In addition, users with no associated students, orders, volunteer sign-ups or event registrations may be considered inactive.
However, all of the above may still not be an indication that the user account should be removed. For example, one of the two parents may be less active than the other, but still keep an account for communication and the occasional access purposes.
Another example, some sites add “dummy” accounts in order to use them in the system, such as PTA email accounts for the purpose of chair information. These will also show inactive and you will need to filter them appropriately.
An OSP administrator may use reports to identify these inactive accounts and remove them. Note that if these reports are run after July 1st, the “school year” filter must be applied to query the previous school year information.
OSP administrators are responsible for updating the Teacher List by visiting Admin à Packets à Teachers. This is highly recommended to be done before parents register their kids so the information is available during that process.
For schools that offer yearly memberships, Admins do not have to define new membership products each year. Membership purchases are automatically annotated using the school year, so on July 1st, all memberships from the previous year are archived, and current/upcoming year ones can be purchased. It is recommended to update product text if it specifies the year for which they are purchased.
Once the archiving process occurs on July 1st, all site users that were previously considered “paid members” become “unpaid members” as their membership status is reset.
Some PTAs consider “paid members” as authorized, which means they can access restricted content. Note that OSP does not have an automatic connection between a paid membership and the authorized status of a user. If these authorizations were done manually, they must also be undone/reset manually.
Programs require a review, update of descriptions (especially those including dates), chair names, and the visibility status in the general programs page. Programs also have other information associated with them, listed below.
All event registrations are archived by OSP on July 1st. This means that for the new school year, programs no longer have any event registrations associated with them. See Packets section for more information.
Products are defined in association with programs. They should be reviewed and cleaned up. Product definitions include prices, locations and availability dates that should be updated. If a product is no longer offered in the new school year, simply leaving the availability dates for the previous year will make it unavailable.
All volunteer sign-ups are archived automatically by OSP. Those aren’t relevant in the new school year. However, volunteer positions are often quite useful to keep around as they indicate the volunteer needs. Here too, descriptions should be updated.
Once products and volunteer positions are cleaned up for the year, packets should be reviewed as well. Many will include school-year specific information and need to updated. In particular, the Join packet should be definitely reviewed and tested to ensure that everything that needs to be communicated or offered in the new school year is available.
The following summarizes the actions that an administrator should take in order to prepare their website for the new school year:
Strongly recommended:
Optional: