Once you have configured your data connections, you are ready to determine what types of events should sync to calendars and who should be included in those events when you eventually start your sync. In School Cal, this is done through event-level filters and attendee-level filters. You can always change these filters later and re-sync, so while you are in pilot mode you may want to adjust some of these to see their effects first hand. Read more about the different filters below. Please note that each filter section has its own save button. Be sure to save all of your updates!

Event-Level Filters

Event-level filters allow you to specify whether all events should be synced to your calendaring system or just some, based on the properties of the event.

School level

The school levels filter allows you to specify whether classes associated with all school levels should sync or whether just some should. 

You might use this filter if you only wanted middle school classes to sync, for example. In that case, your school level filter selection would match that at right.

In Veracross, for example, the school level of a class can be found in the first column in the All Classes query. It is also on the “Other” tab on the specific class record:

Course types

The course type filter allows you to specify whether classes of all course types should sync or whether just some types should. You might use this filter if you only want to sync Academic and Advisory classes, for example. In that case, your course type filter selection might look like:

Typically, the course type of a class is inherited from the course the class is associated with.

Date Filters

The meeting dates filter allows you to limit how far into the future SchoolCal should sync events. If a sync cut-off date is selected, only events on and before that date will sync. 

This filter can be helpful if you have a very large number of current classes in your SIS. Google has an event creation limit of 100,000 at a time and so we recommend using the meeting dates filter to reduce the number of events that need to be created if your number of SchoolCal-created events is near this limit. 

This filter can also be helpful when you launch SchoolCal to your community. If you’d like to launch first by syncing only a couple weeks or a month of events, this can make your first school-wide sync occur faster so that you can quickly begin to verify that the sync occurs as expected. You can then sync again with a date further in the future, or sync all future events. In addition you may wish to sync only first semester classes - this can be done by setting a cutoff date for the end of the first semester and then changing back to "Only Future Dates" once your second semester classes have been scheduled.

Attendee-Level Filters

Attendee-level filters allow you to specify who should be added as guests on the events that SchoolCal creates. In effect, these filters also determine for whom events should be synced - all students and faculty or just a selection of them.

Grade levels

The grade levels filter allows you to specify which grade levels of students should be included as event attendees. This filter can be helpful if you don’t want SchoolCal to sync students at all, or if you just want it to sync for some grades, such as grades 9-12. 

In the first case, if you select “Do not include students”, events will be created with only faculty listed as attendees (no students will appear on the guest list) and so the events will only appear on the individual calendars of faculty members (not on students’ individual calendars).

Another scenario, if you limit syncing to just 9-12th graders, no younger students will be added as event attendees. This means both that events will not appear on the calendars of 8th graders and that no 8th graders will appear as attendees for any event. Therefore, if there is a class that has students in both 8th and 9th grades, only the 9th graders will appear as event attendees for that class.

Faculty Level Roles

The faculty roles filter allows you to specify which faculty members should be included as event attendees as determined by the class_permission_role type that they've been assigned in a class, depending upon your SIS. 

This filter can be helpful if you want to limit the faculty roles that appear in the event guest list, perhaps because you use a specific role, such as “Other” for non-teaching, observers of the class. In that case, you can use this filter to select only the faculty roles that you would like to appear as attendees:

This filter can also be helpful in giving a bit more granularity to what events you’d like to sync for your employees. For example, if you’d like both academic classes and athletic programs to sync for students, but only academic responsibilities to sync for faculty, you can use the event filter to select academic and athletic programs while only selecting “Primary Teacher,” “Teacher’s Aide,” and “Additional Teacher” within the faculty roles filter. This would sync only teaching responsibilities for someone who is a teacher and a coach, but would sync both academic and athletic events for students.