It’s hard to believe that it’s July. It’s hot (ridiculously hot!). And I’m about to talk about fall grade promotion.

Here in North Carolina, some year rounds schools have already “gone back” to school. This seems like a strange use of words (‘gone back’) when talking about ‘year round’ schools.

Let’s talk about how this plays out in your church management software. A few software programs now offer automatic grade promotion (I know Breeze does). In Breeze, you can set your date for auto-promotion. So that one the given date, all grades move up.

In CCB, you’ll have to tell it to promote everyone from one grade into another.

Here are a few tips and factors to consider.

1. What grade did you ask for from kids who registered for summer events (missions trips, camps, VBS, etc.). If you asked for what grade they were entering, you do not want to promote those kids.
2. Create a “holding” group or tag and reverse the promotion. Put all kids in grade 12 into a holding group. Then move from 11th to 12th, 10th to 11th, 9th to 10th, etc. By doing that each group will be cleared before you move new people from the previous grade into it. If you went in reverse and moved everyone from Kindergarten into 1st, then when you moved 1st into 2nd, you’d be moving all of your former Kindergarten students into 2nd grade.
3. Consider a fall data-drive. At one church, we handed out paper forms to each family or individual over 18. We handed out the forms for 8 weeks to make sure each family had one. At the end of those 8 weeks, we drew a name from all the forms submitted to win a $50 gift card to a local family restaurant. We were able to update over 100 family profiles in our system that year.
4. Consider separating each class into a separate event. Rather than children checking into ‘elementary’ or ‘kids’ ministry, they check into their class – K, 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc.. Use that data to cross check their profiles for correct grades.

Those are just a few things that have helped me verify and update data over the years. I’d love to hear how you’re cross-checking your data and keeping it updated.