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Promote Classes and Sessions

Some religious education programs move a group of students from one class/session to another each year. For example, all students in Jr. High Level 1 are promoted to Jr. High Level 2.
Note: If you allow students to sign up individually for classes, use Enrollment at the beginning of the year instead of moving the entire class as a group.

There are a few things you need to do to promote classes and sessions.

Back up your data

  1. On the File menu in your PDS program, click Backup / Restore / Archive > Backup Data.
  2. Click Backup Data.
  3. Enter a reason for the backup, such as "Backup before promoting classes/sessions".
  4. Select a backup method, and enter or select any relevant information.
  5. Click Start Backup.
  6. After your data is backed up, you can print the backup information for your reference.

Print the final versions of this year's reports

Once you run this process, only the new year's information displays. Print any reports you may need with this year's information.

Watch & Learn

Learn to print student progress report cards. 4 min 49 sec

It may take a minute for the video to display. To watch in full screen mode, click the expand icon in the video player.

To watch more videos, visit the PDS Video Library.

Determine your course of action

Carefully select which items in the Formation Remove/Advance process you are going to perform before you run the Automatic Class/Session Promotion. In a situation like this, here are some tips:

  • In the Remove/Advance process, you can remove everything except the current student and catechist schedules. You need those for Automatic Class/Session Promotion.
  • To add this year's information to permanent records, you must run Remove/Advance before Automatic Class/Session Promotion.
  • Automatic Class/Session Promotion replaces the old session with the new one. So, you don't need to go back to Remove/Advance to remove the student schedule. Also, you don't need to change the catechist schedule unless there's a change of catechists next year.

Promote classes and sessions

  1. Make sure the classes and year/periods you plan to promote to are defined in the Class Schedules window and the Class or Session Year/Period keyword list.
  2. On the Information tab, click Students > Processes then, on the Formation Processes tab, click Automatic Class/Session Promotion.
  3. Select the class/session to move students from, then select the new class/session to move students into.
  4. Click the add icon green plus sign, and repeat this for each class or session.
    CAUTION:

    It's important to promote all classes using automatic posting at one time.

    For example, if you promote the 5th Grade RE class to 6th Grade RE, but you do not promote the 6th Grade RE class to 7th Grade RE, both the newly-promoted 5th graders and the original 6th graders are assigned to the 6th Grade RE class.

  5. Select to include only active, only inactive, or all students.
  6. When you're ready to move the students, click Post Classes/Sessions.

the Automatic Class/Session Promotion process showing the moves from one class/session to another