Schools often want to group students to keep them together, or apart, or with a specific set of teachers. There are three methods that may be used to have the Loader schedule certain groups of students together. It's important to understand these three options and decide which method to use when building the master schedule. It is advisable to only choose one of the three options per grouping, otherwise the Loader will not know which method to follow and will not schedule the students correctly or may just stop during the loading process. Let's look at an example: Our middle school wants to group students together with the same set of teachers for Language Arts, Social Studies, Math and Science to allow the teachers to share the same group of students and have a common planning period. This can be done using one of the following methods, all found in the Loader Setup application: Class Rules, Section Linking, or Team Definitions.

An Overview for Comparison: 

Class Rules

  • May be copied from year to year.
  • Must make sure master schedule is built using the same section numbers for courses tied with the same section rule.
  • Can only tie two courses together at a time.
  • Exactly the same students are scheduled together in the matching sections.
  • Students must have course requests for all of the courses tied with the rule.

Section Linking

  • Must wait until the master schedule is built to create links.
  • Links may be copied from year to year as part of copying the master schedule.
  • Students only receive a course request for the root course of the link. Do NOT give requests for all linked courses.
  • Exactly the same students are scheduled together in all links.
  • There is a greater margin of error when building the master schedule and running the Loader.

Team Definitions

  • Teams may be copied from year to year.
  • Teams may be added after the schedule is built using the Master Schedule Manager.
  • It’s easy to view courses attached to each team in the Master Schedule Manager as well as all teams attached to a course.
  • Must attach a team to each section of a course that is part of a team.
  • When multiple sections of courses are on a team, the students may be distributed randomly among the sections.
  • Requests may be given to a student for a specific team which can help keep students apart.
  • If no team request is given, the Loader will randomly place students on a team.