School Calendar - UDM v3.1

The School Calendar domain represents the instructional days, sessions, and grading periods defined for a school year. The defined sessions for a school year are associated with the education organization (e.g., state education agency, local education agency) or school that defines the calendar.

Key Entities

This domain contains: 

• The Session entity, which models an instructional span of time such as a term or semester.
• The GradingPeriod and AcademicWeek entities, which group calendar events according to start and end dates, accordingly.
• The Calendar entity which represents a collection of dates.
• The CalendarEvent entity, which identifies a date and a type of activity for the date such as instructional day, holiday, make-up day, and so forth.

Key Concepts

The key concepts include the following:

• The School Calendar domain model is fundamentally enumerative: all dates of note (e.g., all instructional dates) are listed as part of the calendar. Humans generally think of calendars as being “all non-weekend and non-vacation days between date A and date B,” but in K–12 systems such as SIS systems, calendars are rarely implemented that way. This domain follows suit.
• Note that the Session entity BeginDate and EndDate elements may be needed to determine instructional dates within a session. However, it is not recommended to have a calendar for each session: sessions capture terms on which credits are awarded. Rather, the recommended practice is to have an annual calendar. If it is necessary to know the instructional dates for a term or session, look to the session dates to determine those.
• The Ed-Fi data model has no district or local education agency calendars. Calendars in the Ed-Fi data model represent instructional days and so are school-level and below. A district calendar would therefore be a collection of identical school calendars.

Sessions, Grading Periods, Calendars, and Calendar Dates

The Ed-Fi data model allows fine-grained modeling of instructional schedules, but it's useful to know where to look.

• The Session entity models concepts like terms and semesters (e.g., Fall Semester, First Quarter) along with a span of time.
• The GradingPeriod entity models a span of time for which grades are reported (e.g., First Six Weeks, First Trimester). The grading period is often, but not necessarily, a division of a session.
• The Calendar entity represents a set of specific dates. In the context of the School Calendar domain, these usually represent instructional days.
• The CalendarDate entity models a specific date, and allows additional information to describe the type of date (e.g., Instructional day, Holiday, Weather day).

This raises a modeling question. Why not use the Session or GradingPeriod entities to hold the collection of CalendarDate entities? In the Ed-Fi data model, we've kept the two separate to allow flexibility while avoiding duplicate data. This allows schools to have multiple sessions (e.g., for different grade levels) and grading periods (e.g., for different programs) while maintaining a single calendar for the school as a whole.

Model Reference

This section contains reference information for the School Calendar domain model. 

School Calendar Model Entities