Sunday school classes as activities

[debbieg]

Following recommendations from others, I had set up the original activity groups for our Children's Sunday School classes as one for each grade (Ie. 1st-12th). the theory was that it would make life easier each year when the students moved up one grade and you could do mass updates. The problem is, our SS classes are actually grouped with several grades together - 1st-3rd, 4th-5th, middle school (6-8) and high school (9-12). They have also recently restructured the middle and high school so that initially they all meet together and then break up into 4 groups (MS boys, MS girls, HS boys, HS girls).
I just found out that the SS secretary eliminated the individual activities and lumped them together to mimic the classes. The reasons were - wasting paper to print multiple attendance sheets for each class, the teachers would be counted multiple times for each grade they had in their class and in general they wanted it to reflect the actual grouping of classes.
Is there any way to address these problems? Can you make a group activity with sub-groups? How would that affect the attendance sheets and attendance reports? Would I need to create a custom report?

I'm sure there are other churches with mixed grade SS classes; how do you handle it?
Thanks.

[NeilZ]

Following recommendations from others, I had set up the original activity groups for our Children's Sunday School classes as one for each grade (Ie. 1st-12th). the theory was that it would make life easier each year when the students moved up one grade and you could do mass updates. The problem is, our SS classes are actually grouped with several grades together - 1st-3rd, 4th-5th, middle school (6-8) and high school (9-12). They have also recently restructured the middle and high school so that initially they all meet together and then break up into 4 groups (MS boys, MS girls, HS boys, HS girls).
I just found out that the SS secretary eliminated the individual activities and lumped them together to mimic the classes. The reasons were - wasting paper to print multiple attendance sheets for each class, the teachers would be counted multiple times for each grade they had in their class and in general they wanted it to reflect the actual grouping of classes.
Is there any way to address these problems? Can you make a group activity with sub-groups? How would that affect the attendance sheets and attendance reports? Would I need to create a custom report?

I'm sure there are other churches with mixed grade SS classes; how do you handle it?
Thanks.

The problem with mixed grade classes, is that you can't promote to the next grade when you have 1st thru 3rd in the same activity. I don't believe that there is a way to use a 'subgroup' to get what you want done.

FWIW ... I think the Sunday School teacher jumped the gun. You could have created an attendance list using a custom report that would have encompassed those grade groupings.

[Jeff]

For this reason we added a new feature in v11. You can now set when a student should be prompted to the next class. Also in maintain activity descriptions, there is a new field for the next class. There is also a new assistant for promotions to promote all classes at once.

[NeilZ]

For this reason we added a new feature in v11. You can now set when a student should be prompted to the next class. Also in maintain activity descriptions, there is a new field for the next class. There is also a new assistant for promotions to promote all classes at once.

Ah yes ... its on the new Promotion tab on the Maintain Activities & Skills Description. Nice new feature.

Quick question Jeff, if say this is set for a three grade class (1st, 2nd & 3rd), and the length is setup for 3 years, if I add a 2nd grader in 2009, they should be promoted in 2 years, what happens ?? Should I set the promotion year to 2011 ?? Do they automatically get promoted in January, or is this something that is triggered when the mass promotion is run ??

[Jeff]

There are several moving pieces to get to get this to work correctly

File -> Preferences -> Activities & Skills Setup Options
You need to specify what month you do your sunday school promotion.

Membership -> Activities & Skills -> Setup -> Maintain Activity/Skill Descriptions
Specify what the next class is and the default # of years.

Sample activity 1st, 2nd, 3rd grade class. Length of class set to 3 years
We do class promotion in August.

If I add a student to this class before 8/1/2009 their promotion year will be set as 2011. If I add them to the class in November 2009 - July 2010, the promotion year will be 2012. This is because the 2009 promotion has already taken place.

The promotion year default doesn't know the actual grade, so it just defaults the length of the class. So for a second grader being added to this class, you will have to manually change this to the correct year.

You can keep someone from being promoted (like the teacher) by clearing out the promotion year field in Maintain Activity Skills. (Membership -> Activities & Skills -> Maintain Activities & Skills) Or Maintain Personal Profiles on the Activities tab.

[debbieg]

Jeff,
thanks for that info on the v11 release. We hadn't decided whether to do the upgrade or not. we've only had the software for 1 year and really haven't done anything except load some members and put in contributions. We just started a couple of months ago to set up the activities and take SS attendance. I'll put that in the positive side for reasons to upgrade.

Debbie