Understanding the Flag Register

©Copyright 2008, Budd Churchward
In addition to roll-room groups, advisor-groups, grade levels and Honor Levels you can place students if your own customized groups using the Flag Register.

You can create dozens of groups and any student may be assigned membership in up to six different groups. Members can be added or removed from groups as needed throughout the school year.

Defining a Flagged Group

Flagged Groups should first be created from the Groups window. They are defined by a flag that you can see in the student record as a series of ?'s and other characters. A student's flag register might look like this: C????F. The group flag consists of nearly any single, printable character. This feature is case sensitive so the upper and lower case versions of any letter can be used for two different groups. Click here to see how to define a group.

To see a more verbose description of a student's flag register click Edit Biographic on the student record.

Here are some sample flagged groups:

• B - Boys Basketball Team
• b - Girls Basketball Team
• C - Choir
• w - Wrestling Team

If you included gender information when your data was prepared the following two flags were automatically set for you:

• F - Female Students
• M - Male Students

Pre-defined Group Flags

There are a few flags that have special pre-defined purposes. These should only be used for their intended use as the software has been written to recognize these flags.

• ? - Whole School
• ! - 7 Day Kids
• + - Locked on HL4
• O - Off Track Students
• W - Withdrawn Students

Let's look at these individually.

• ? - This character is a place holder in the student's flag register. As long as every student has at least one ? we can use this flag to create a list of the whole student body.

• ! - This character designates that a student has been placed on a short window. Click this link for more information.

• + - This character has been reserved to Lock a Student's Honor Level. As long as this flag is in a child's register he or she will not be allowed to get back to Honor Level One.

• O - Note that this character is the capital letter O. It is reserved for students who are currently not attending school. Year round schools often stagger the vacation periods of their students. The Off Track is the group of students who are on break at this time. Any student with this flag in his or her register will be treated the same as Withdrawn Students (see next item).

• W - This flag is reserved for students who have withdrawn from school. This allows you to keep the record and print reports when needed yet not have the student's name appear on Honor Level Lists or other reports.

  Adding Students to Flagged Groups

  There are many ways to add students to flagged groups. You can do it individually from the Edit Biographic Data window or by selecting Flags from the groups window.