Each year it is necessary to advance most students to the next grade level. The School Bus Management System will perform this function with very little direction, using the data it already has. Students are upgraded by school. You select the school to be upgraded and there is no specific order for this to be done.
The informtation found in the Schools data base file indicate what grade levels are offered at each school. If, for instance, you are upgrading a middle school, offering 6th, 7th & 8th grades. The system will find that 9th thru 12th grades are not available at this school and will ask, "Where do you want the students graduating from 8th Grade to go?" A list of all schools is presented for the operator to choose from. Students graduating from one school, requiring a move to another school will have the school code changed to reflect the move in addition to the normal Grade & Grade Year upgrade described below.
Students can be added to the Student Data Base in the next grade up, even before the Automatic Upgrade is performed, without affecting that student. If you are adding a student in June, let's say, to start in 9th grade the next year and you haven't performed the automatic upgrade for this school. You can enter the student into the data base for 9th grade and entering the school year for the next school year. When the Automatic upgrade is performed for this school, the system will know that this student has already been upgraded for the next school year.
The school year is established as follows. If the current school year covers the fall of 1996 thru spring of 1997, the school year for the current student grade is set to 1996. When the upgrade is performed, only students with a grade year of 1996 will be upgraded. The upgrade will increment the student grade by one and enter the next year into the grade year.