A new District Attendance Letter feature is now available as a "Beta" feature. Districts are encouraged to evaluate this new feature of Aeries and consider using it in the 19-20 school year. This feature is meant to generate batches of letters at the district level, and allow school sites to confirm those letters before they are sent out. One of the benefits of centering letters around the district will be that these letters will have the capability of tracking attendance from multiple schools within the district. Also, district attendance letters will be able to be sent via Aeries Communications, email, or by printing out the letters.
A new option Disable School Based Attendance Letters has been added, which will remove the school based attendance letter feature so that the district letters feature can be used in its place.
Student Attendance
When school based letters are disabled, a district letter log will now display on the student attendance page to inform users of these important parent communications. Also, when school based letters are disabled, a new option to Exclude the student from Attendance Letters will be available.
Summer School Course Requests
Multiple classes with the same Course ID are now allowed in a Summer School Term.
Financials
A few improvements were added to the Financials page and also to the Parent/Student Portal. (1) The look and feel in certain areas were improved. (2) The Amount Paid column shows blank for payment transactions instead of showing zero. (3) Charged transactions that were fully paid now show as Paid instead Completed. (4) The transaction details popup now shows only the fields that are related to the transaction.
Civil Rights Data Collection
The Beta version of the Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) for the 2017-18 school year has been updated to include more sections and functionality. Also, some users experienced an error when running this page, fixed. This page is currently available as a "BETA". Districts may evaluate the results and provide feedback.
Report Card History and Secondary Standards Based Report Cards
These reports now honor KEEP/SKIP queries.
School of Choice Management
This page now supports sending large amounts of emails without any issues. Also, the parent name and email fields have been added for filtering the grid, and a "Full Contact List" button has also been added to each record. Also, when parents attempt to add a new student record, they will not be allowed to continue if name and birthdate data matches an existing active student. Also, the email to parents was also emailing the student email address, fixed. Also, a custom email address can now be defined on the School of Choice Options page.
The option to "Expand Student Name" now applies to the Student ID instead of the Student Number, which was removed from this report with the 1/30/2019 version.
Physical Fitness Tests
This page will now properly bypass calculating of VO2Max and Percentage Body Fat from Skinfold values for Nonbinary Gender students since there are no standards for students who identify as nonbinary.
Special Education
Additional fields from the "old" form have been added to the new form. Also, the most recent state of the expanded "More Info" sections will be remembered for each user. Also, the "More Info" link will no longer display if there is nothing to show in the expanded sections for the current record. Also, new fields have been added to support the needs of Texas Districts. These new fields will not be displayed to districts outside Texas.
Login Backgrounds
Additional protections have been put in place to reduce the likelihood of an internal error that would result in a user seeing the default Aeries Login Background.
Ed-Fi BETA
Aeries is working to support the Ed-Fi data standard for systems interoperability. Early Adopter Districts are now testing this functionality and using the new pages flagged as "BETA".
Master Schedule
When using the "Copy" process to move students to a new section, if the course was changed in the new section, the old course ID would still be stored in the student's SEC record, fixed.
Student Contacts report
This report was printing the student address and telephone for all contacts that did not have those values, fixed.
Gradebook
The gradebooks in the dropdown menu were not being sorted correctly, fixed.
Calendar
Teachers were unable to add an event in the home page. Also the Event Scope and Association fields in the add event popup window were not functioning, fixed.
Aeries Mobile Portal App
Users with a very long email address or password were unable to log in. Also, certain Apple devices encountered a JSON message when attempting to log in with an invalid password, fixed.
Grade Report Cards on Plain Paper
These reports were resulting in an error since the 1/30/2019 version when using the "Mail Info At Top" option, fixed.
Student Transcripts report
The Grade label at the top of this report had the potential to overlap other labels since the 1/30/2019 version, fixed. Also, this report was resulting in an error when "Print Student Legal Name" was selected since the 1/30/2019 version, fixed.
Class Period Absence Summary report
This report was resulting in an error since the 1/30/2019 version, fixed.
Physical Fitness by Teacher / Teacher PFT
This page has been giving "no students in this class" errors since the 1/30/2019 version even when students exist, fixed. Also, the "Print Roster" report now honors the Gender selection, including Nonbinary.
Physical Fitness reports
Various fitness reports would have considered a Nonbinary student as "Male" for calculations of VO2Max and Percentage Body Fat from Skinfold values, fixed. These values will now be zero since there are no standards for students who identify as nonbinary.
Navigation
Under certain circumstances, a Custom Table page would not display in the navigation menu even though the user had permission, fixed.
CALPADS Extracts
The Student Information extract (SINF) has been adjusted. If the STU.GN (previously STU.SX) field is populated with a non-binary gender code, the SINF extract will now extract from the Legal Student Information (LSI) table . Because the non-binary gender is not yet supported by CALPADS, the Legal Student Information (LSI) table must be populated with the traditional gender codes (M or F) if STU.GN has a non-binary gender code.
Nguyen Tran
For further information on this new feature:
https://support.aeries.com/a/solutions/folders/14000120494
https://support.aeries.com/support/solutions/folders/14000119125
https://support.aeries.com/support/solutions/articles/14000068180-school-of-choice-parent-login-existing-and-new-students
https://support.aeries.com/support/solutions/articles/14000071531-caaspp-export-files
https://support.aeries.com/support/solutions/articles/14000089675-avery-5160-labels