Quick Guide: Preparing for October State Reporting (2018)

SIF Districts:

Step 1: Set the transmission “As of Date” to October 1.

• For SIMS & SCS: Set the Last Transmission Date to 10/01/2018. This is set on the DOE ID Manager > DOE Maintenance > MA DOE Parameters screen. DOE Parameters are school specific so this must be done for EACH school. Setting it to October 1 is for the SIMS and SCS submissions. It will also make sure that students enrolled as of 10/01/2018 are included in the transmissions and will calculate the correct SIMS Days in Membership as of the report date.

• For EPIMS: Set the “EPIMS Export As-of Date” to 10/01/2018. This is set on the iStaff Biographical > iStaff Procedures – iStaff Bio > iStaff Configuration screen.

Step 2: Check the School Calendar and the Academic Year Settings at each school to confirm holiday/no school days are entered correctly and the Start Dates/End Dates are accurate for your terms. These dates are used for calculating SIMS Attendance.

Step 3: Check the Academic Year Settings to confirm the additional "fake" SCS Terms are highlighted, Start/End Dates are entered, and the Term Order matches what was used the previous year. *(If the order is changed, this will affect the Term Instances set up on PCL Documents such as Report Cards. It should remain the same so that grades will print in the correct locations on the PCL Documents.)

Step 4: Check the Grade Headings & Terms screen to confirm it is set up to "Include" all Terms/Grade Headings for the entire school year and check the Grade Heading screen to confirm that there is a Grade Heading set to Is Final Grade = Yes. 

Step 5: Create EPIMS Work Assignments “as of” October 1.

• All SIF districts need to run the EPIMS Export with “Recalculate FTE” = Yes and “Reset Term Codes” = Yes to create the Work Assignment records and identify the Active Term courses. This is found under iStaff Biographical > iStaff Procedures > Export DOE EPIMS Data. Note: If you have been editing Work Assignments, if you run the export again with Recalculate/Reset set to Yes it will overwrite any changes you have made to the records. Typically this reset is only done on your initial run or to start over. *(Note that SIF Work Assignment FTEs values are generated from the Career FTE divided by the number of Work Assignments for each Job Type and are not pulled from the Work Assignments.)

Step 6:  Recycle the SIF Processors

• Go to SIF Agent > SIF Processors
• Shutdown and Restart the SIF Events and Response Processors

Step 7: Prior to sending your SIF Objects for the new transmission period it is recommended that you check off “Purge All Log Files Except Current Day” to remove logs from the last transmission period, making it easier to reference your active transmission log files. It is recommended to keep the logs for the current reporting period in case they need to be referenced.

Step 8: Clear the SIF Temp Table and send the SIMS, SCS, and EPIMS SIF Objects to the DOE using SIF Agent > SIF – Send Objects. 

Reminder to send Summer Withdrawals: October SIMS must include "Summer Withdrawals." There are no triggers to send these students to DESE so you will need to send the Summer Withdrawals Objects initially to include these students in the transmission AND any time you make an update to clear errors for these students.

For more information on which Objects to send, go to iPass Help > SIF > Help > How do I send SIF data objects to the DOE and which objects to I send for each state report?

NOTE: DESE expects all school districts using a SIF enabled SIS application (ie. iPass) to report their 2018-2019 SIMS, SCS, EPIMS and SSDR State Reports via SIF transmission. In the event that Legacy flat-file submission is required, you will still follow all steps above to prepare for your submission..