School calendars in Nebraska that do not align to current Ed-Fi standards

Summary of outcomes for Data Standard 2.1

• Problem Addressed: The current design does not allow a school to have multiple calendars for different grades or groups of students and staff. Additionally, the association between CalendarDate and Session and CalendarDate and GradingPeriod creates confusion regarding the intended usage of the CalendarDate entity for attendance and scheduling.
• High-level Reasoning: In practice, different grades or cohorts of students may have different calendars, but the current model only allows for one calendar per school. By adding the Calendar domain entity with an optional collection of grade levels, different grade levels may have unique calendars. By adding a reference to Calendar on Cohort, Cohorts in a school may also have different calendars independent of grade levels. CalendarDates are then no longer directly associated with Schools, but instead with Calendars, which are associated with Schools. Finally, the existing ties between CalendarDate and Session and GradingPeriod seem to imply that CalendarDate may be used to define a Session or GradingPeriod, whereas the intended uitilization for CalendarDate is to be a more operational component upon which attendance and student scheduling is determined. Removing these links may limit this misconception.
• Changes Made:
  ○ Created Calendar domain entity with key to consist of SchoolReference, shared string IdentificationCode named CalendarCode, and SchoolYear type;
  ○ Additional properties include a required reference to CalendarTypeDescriptor and a reference to GradeLevelDescriptor as optional collection;
  ○ An optional reference to Calendar was added on the Cohort domain entity;
  ○ A reference to Calendar was added on the CalendarDate domain entity as part of the identity;
  ○ All other references to CalendarDate or references from CalendarDate to other entities were removed with the exception of a reference to CalendarDate from SectionAttendanceTakenEvent and the aforementioned Calendar reference as part of the identity

Original ticket description follows:

The current calendar system in Ed-Fi fails to account for a number of situations, such as partial days. Those use cases are described in the attached file:

Examples of school calendars in Nebraska that do not align - solution examples.docx

Note that the description of this ticket has been updated on 3/20/2017 - the ticket description contained design elements that were superseded by design decisions documented in the notes below, creating the opportunity to mislead readers.