A school needed an online admission application process to be developed and integrated with CiviSchool. The application form is a different workflow from the online family forms. Web Access helped convert this idea to working application as part of the CiviSchool Project. I have been working with Web Access on this project and we have completed most of it. Now seemed to be a good time to let everyone know about what we have done so far. Here is how the admission workflow is -

• Parent account setup :
  A parent goes to the school site and uses a civicrm registration profile to create an account and enters the site. The account automatically gets assigned a "Applicant Parent" subtype.
• Filling admission application forms :
  From the dashboard parent fills admission application forms for an applicant (child). Parent can apply for 1 or more applicants. All applicants are assigned a "Applicant" subtype.
• Submitting a payment :
  Depending on whether financial aid is taken or not, parent submits a payment for an applicant. The payment is done via contribution page with contribution type - "Application Fee". Since parent is the one making the payment, to keep track of which applicant the payment is being done for, an extra argument is passed to the payment/contribution url. We using a hook to make all the checks and link the payment to the applicant.
• Scheduling appointments :
  Once the application is complete and payment is made (if needed), parent can schedule a child visit or a parent interview. A school tour could be booked at any stage of the process.

We've been hard at work implementing an online set of forms to collect family information for the school module. This is one of our final projects for the year and eliminates the tedious summer ritual for the admin staff of sending paper forms to the 200 school families and for the parent to fill out the same information every year. This also saves the admin staff from entering that same information into the SIS

We've built this work on the parent portal that we launched late last year. Parents can update information on themselves and their children anytime via their drupal account. The form is composed of 5 sub-forms:

• Household Information: Name, Email, Phone and Address of the household. We currently support 2 household and 4 contacts. These are stored as CiviCRM contacts with a relationship link of type Parent / Child to the student. We created a custom group to store which household a parent belonged to. We did not use CiviCRM's household functionality.
  

The next phase of the CiviSchool project is collecting and maintaining all parent / student information online. This avoids the annual filling out forms work by the parents, and also the stuffing of envelopes by school staff during the summer and reentering all the information in the SIS when school starts.

To make things easier, we wanted to export and import as much data as possible from PowerSchool. It has a pretty good export and we got all the information in a nice familiar CSV format. However the system is not very "relational". Parents and addresses have multiple records (one for each student), hence there is some amount of inconsistency in the system with regard to names and addresses. Also we have the CiviCRM/Drupal based system in operation for a year and this has also resulted in slight divergence between the two systems.

We had a great day at DrupalCon SF 2010 today, especially in our BoF sessions :) To keep the momentum going, we are planning to have a few more BoF sessions:

• Canvassing and GOTV (Get Out The Vote) functionality in CiviCRM. We'd like to extend the current CiviEngage module and incorporate the work done by Will B on Voter Canvassing. We'd also like to incorporate some of the ideas floating around with regard to CiviPetition and build campaign functionality in CiviCRM. This BoF will be scheduled for Tuesday afternoon, 3:00 pm. I'll update the blog post with room details soon.
• CiviSchool module for K-12. We've built and deployed a school module to manage a K-8 school interaction with staff / parents / students. We'd like to extend this module, deploy it in more schools and integrate it with open source and commercial SIS packages (Student Information Systems). We'd like to use this BoF to explore how more folks can be involved in this project. This BoF will be scheduled for Wednesday morning, 9:30 am.

Some of you'll are aware of the work i've done for The San Francisco School using Drupal 6.x / CiviCRM 2.2. You can read more technical details about this project on my blog.

Database

• Maintain name/email/phone/address information for people associated with the school (students, staff and parents)
• Maintain relationships between parents and their children
• Maintain relationships between a teacher / advisor and their students

Current Features deployed at SFS

• Give all parents and staff a login/password
• Online signups for all Parent Teacher Conferences
• Online signups for all extended care activity (classes after school)
• Sign-in / Sign-out for students attending extended care
• Computation of how many "activity" blocks a student has spent on extended care
• Parent viewing of the various extended care activities their kids have attended in the past
• Online maps of "Where we Live" of the school families
• Online directories of the schools and grades.

This is a continuing series of blog posts on deploying CiviCRM at San Francisco School. In the previous blog posts we discussed how to expose relationship information in a profile and how to manage parent teacher conferences. There are also some slides explaining the module from a recent training seminar

Our latest project was automating the extended care (classes before and after school) system. The previous process was quite manual and labor intensive (and error prone). The attendance sheet was printed (via a CiviReport) from the students signed in. The students queued up and were signed into the extended care program. Some of the students had to be manually written in (if they were not signed up). At the end of the day, the parents would pick up the child and locate the childs name in the multiple sheets and sign them out. Typically 10-20% of parents would not sign their children out. The business office would then take this piece of paper and then calculate the "activity blocks" (based on time spent in extended care) and enter them in an excel spreadsheet. There were a few exceptions to the rule (children of staff, students who signed up for unlimited extended care and some activities are free)

I continue my work on deploying CiviCRM for my kids school. In previous blog posts i documented how to use hooks and custom templates to schedule parent teacher conferences and extended care activities and how to expose relationship information in a profile view. In this blog post I'll describe some more advanced features. I'll also describe the code and directory structure.

New Code Structure and Directory Layout

I've been working on customizing CiviCRM for my kids school. I documented how i exposed relationship information on a profile view in this blog post. In the past week i've also exposed "activities" and "a multiple record custom group" via profiles which i'll describe in this blog post. All this work was done via civicrm hooks and custom templates and run on CiviCRM v2.2.8. You can download the code from here. In this blog post i'll discuss two features that i've implemented: Scheduling Parent Teacher Conferences and Managing Extended Care.

Scheduling Parent Teacher Conferences

The school wanted an automated system to schedule parent teacher conferences. These meetings typically last 30 mins. For some grades its all done in one day, for some other classes its spread out over a couple of weeks (few slots / day). I decided to create a new activity type called "Parent Teacher Conference". For the first parent teacher conference, we have 4 advisors and 30 students. The conferences happen on the same day between 7:00 am - 6:00 pm. Each advisor has 10 students. Some students have 2 advisors. I wrote a script to populate these activities automatically with the assignee being the advisor. The advisor also has the option of going into his activities tab and deleting all the times when she/he does not want a meeting. We also created a new relationship type called "Advisor <-> Advisee" and used import to create these relationships.

I'm working on deploying CiviCRM for my kids school website. Part of the project requires us to expose the parent <-> child relationship information on the website and allow parents to edit their child information.

I accomplished this using a combination of civicrm hooks, custom templates, permissioned relationships and custom code in a drupal module. You can access the module and template code here.

The broad steps are:

• Implement hook_civicrm_pageRun for the profile view page (CRM_Profile_Page_Dynamic). Only implement this hook for the specific profile id's you want relationship information. In this case we have two profiles, a Parent Profile (gid=3) and a Student Profile (gid=4)
• The pageRun hook also adds the module's template directory to the smarty include path, so we dont have to set it globally. This also allow multiple modules to append different template directories to the template include path (check the function _sfschool_initialize)
• The hook gets either the parent or the child information using a custom query. We ensure that only permissioned parents can see their child information (in case of some complicated family structures). The queries are relatively simple at this stage, i suspect they will increase in complexity over the next few weeks
• The hook exposes the information gathered from the database to the smarty template
• The custom template (templates/CRM/Profile/Page/3/Dynamic.tpl) uses that information to display the relationship data on the page. I also edited the View.tpl template to eliminate the "Back to Listings" link.