Setting up your first year

This guide walks through the standard workflow for setting up an academic year and producing a board-approved calendar.

The big picture

Each school year, you'll go through six stages:

1. Define the academic year — start and end dates, required student time, display format.
2. Define grading periods — quarters, semesters, six-week terms, or whatever structure your district uses.
3. Define day types — holidays, half days, in-service days, and other deviations from a normal school day.
4. Invite people — editors who will build calendars, voters who will choose between them, and any observers who need read access.
5. Build calendars — create one or more proposed calendars for the year.
6. Vote and certify — collect votes on the proposals and certify the winning calendar as official.

You don't have to do all six in order, but each one builds on the one before it.

Step 1 — Define the academic year

From the sidebar, open Academic Years and click New academic year. You'll be asked for:

• A name (e.g. "2027-2028" or "2027-2028 Traditional")
• The starting calendar year the school year falls in
• The start and end dates of the year window
• Required student time — the minimum number of student days or minutes the state requires
• A display format — whether you want totals shown in hours, days, or minutes

Once saved, you'll land on the year's overview page. This is your hub for everything related to this year.

Step 2 — Define grading periods

From the year overview, click Manage next to Periods. The first time through, run the setup wizard to create your structure in one step:

• Pick how many primary periods you want (typically 4 quarters or 6 six-week terms).
• Optionally add a layer above it (typically 2 semesters that bracket the quarters).

The wizard sets up the names, colors, and the parent-child links between periods automatically. You can edit any of this afterward.

Tip: linked periods (like semesters built from quarters) derive their dates from the periods they contain. You don't manually set semester boundaries — they follow the quarters.

Step 3 — Define day types

From the year overview, click Manage next to Day types. Day types are the deviations from a normal school day: holidays, half days, in-service days, remote-learning days, breaks.

The fastest way to get started is to click Add typical day types — this seeds the most common ones (winter break, spring break, half days, in-service) with sensible defaults. Then you can edit, add, or remove from there.

Each day type carries three pieces of information:

• A color, used on the calendar grid and exports
• Whether students are on-site / remote / off that day
• Whether staff are on-site / remote / off that day

These two attendance settings drive the background coloring of the calendar editor: green when students are on-site, yellow when staff are working but students are off, red when everyone is off.

A "normal school day" doesn't need a day type — it's the implicit default. Day types only describe the exceptions.

Step 4 — Invite people

From the year overview, click Invite. You'll send an email invitation to each person, with a role for this specific year:

• Year Manager — administers this year's setup and oversight
• Editor — can create and edit calendars in this year
• Voter — can cast votes in voting sessions for this year
• Viewer — can see calendars and voting results but not edit or vote

Roles are per-year. Someone who's a Voter for the 2027-2028 year doesn't automatically get any role for the 2028-2029 year.

Step 5 — Build calendars

From the year overview, click Manage next to Calendars, then New calendar. Give it a descriptive name like "Proposed 2027-2028 — Option A" so voters can tell different proposals apart.

The calendar editor shows the year as a two-column grid: the first half of the year on the left, the second half on the right, with corresponding months side-by-side. Click any day to set:

• A day type (holiday, half day, etc.)
• Notes specific to that day
• Whether it's the first or last contract day of the year (used to anchor the period structure)
• Which grading periods start or end on that day

When you mark a period's start date, the system automatically sets the previous period's end date to the last attendance day before it. You don't have to think about period boundaries — set the starts, and the ends follow.

To set the same day type across many days at once, toggle range mode at the top of the editor, then click the start and end days of the range. Weekends are automatically skipped.

When the calendar is complete, change its status from Draft to In review to submit it for approval.

Step 6 — Vote and certify

When at least one calendar is in Approved status, you can create a voting session. From the sidebar, open Voting Sessions, pick the year, and click New voting session.

A voting session has:

• A name ("2027-2028 Calendar Adoption")
• A list of eligible calendars (the ones voters will choose between)
• A start and end time (the window in which voting is open)

When voting opens, every eligible Voter receives an email with a link to their ballot. Once voting closes, the session moves to Closed status and you can certify the result. Certification locks the year and marks the winning calendar as Official.

What to do next

• Open the Calendars page to see your draft and continue editing.
• Use Compare calendars (from the year's calendars page) to see proposals side-by-side with the differences highlighted.
• Export any calendar to Excel or PDF from its detail page — useful for printing, board packets, or sharing with stakeholders who don't have accounts in the system.

If you get stuck, contact your organization administrator or reach out to support at support@ms-itsllc.com.