Add Calendar Events
To add your school's calendar or other events and activities, we recommend using the Calendar Events feature. These can be shared with parents and other staff members as needed. Here's how:
- Go to <Calendar> and select "Add New Event" from the Manage Events dropdown menu in the upper left.
- Enter the details of the event including the date and recipients (required fields), and a description and start time, if desired.
- Click “Create Event.”
There is a single school calendar and events are made viewable (or non-viewable) based on the recipients designated in the event details. If you choose "All School," that means all staff members and parents will be able to view the event. If you choose a specific Classroom, all parents and staff members in that classroom, as well as Administrators, can view the event. You can choose an individual user (parent or staff member) or multi-select a hand-picked group of recipients. If you choose your name only, then only you and Administrators on the account can view the event.
Pro Tip: If you plan to use Montessori Compass to keep all your school communication centralized, you may want to create a shortcut to share calendar events and messages with your staff members so you don't need to tag each one individually on every communication. To do this, we recommend using the Classroom feature to create a custom communication group. Just create a new classroom and call it something like "Staff Only." Assign all your teachers to the classroom as teachers, but do not assign any students to the class. Now you can send a message or share a calendar event with the "Staff Only" classroom and all your teachers will see it. Parents will not see it since there are no students in the classroom. You can create as many different classrooms as you'd like.
School Closings and Additional School Days
For holidays and other school closings, we recommend entering them as Events rather than School Days. Note: The School Days feature will be phased out soon. If you choose to use “School Days” instead of “Events,” two things will happen:
- The school closing will publish to the calendar and will be shared with the entire school community, but some of the record keeping tools will be disabled on the School Closed Day(s).
- The system will treat this School Day (closing) the same as it does a weekend. So, there is no Attendance, Student Cards, Observations, etc. available for this day.
Tips:
- If you wish to catch up on record keeping or get ahead on lesson planning on a day when your school is closed, simply change the date in the upper right corner of the page to one when school was (or will be) in session. Now all record keeping features will function normally. Alternatively, you could simply create the "No School" day as a Calendar Event rather than a School Closed Day. This will allow all record keeping features to function normally, and Attendance will not be counted unless you record the students as either Present, Tardy, or Absent.
- In the unusual event you need to make up school days on a weekend (i.e. too many snow days and you need to have school on a Saturday), you can change the day type to "Additional School Day". This will enable you to use the record keeping features on a weekend or other non-school day.