We recommend our automated daily Promotion routine be configured at your church for Participants who promote from one Group to another based on their grade. For example, when a 4th grader (currently in the 4th grade girls Group) completes the school year, she is moved to the 5th grade girls Group.

Setup

To use the daily Promotion routine, open each applicable Group record and set the following values. Once this is complete and the routine is running on the server, individuals are moved daily and automatically:

• Group Type: Any.
• Promote to Group: Select the Group to which kids in this Group should be moved when they age-out of the Group.
• Promotion Date:  A future date for Group Participants to be moved by the routine to the Group indicated by the Promote to Group field. Allow at least 24 hours for the nightly routine to run, see Promotion Routines for more detail.
• Promote Weekly: When the Promotion Date option is used, Promote Weekly should be set to No (False).

Example:

• Current Group Name: 4th grade girls
• Promote to Group: 5th grade girls
• Promotion Date: 8/15/2019
• Promote Weekly=False

Making Exceptions and Troubleshooting

You can make exceptions for certain Participants one by one or by Group Role Type. You can also determine if the Group Participant records are updated or created. See Promotions Routine for details.

Manual Approach

Prior to the enhancements to the Promotion routine (Report & Database Update October 2016), our recommended approach for grade-based promotion of school-aged children was as follows. Note: This method is still valid, but can essentially be setup to happen automatically (see details above).

Approach: Rename the existing Age or Grade Groups. Create a new group only for kids entering the school system:

1. Start with the 12th grade and rename it "Class of [Current Year]".
2. Rename the 11th grade to "12th Grade".
3. Review the "Parent Group", "Ministry", and "Promote To" values for each group to ensure they are correct for the newly renamed group.
4. Repeat step 2 for all other grades down to Kindergarten.
5. Create a new Kindergarten group on the Groups page. 
6. Go to the Group Participants Page.
7. Clear any existing selections.
8. Select the current group participants (on the Group Participants page) in the 4-5-year-old groups that need to move to Kindergarten.  Note, the "Age Group Part By Age" is a helpful view for this step.
9. View "Currently Selected" records.
10. Launch the Assign tool.
11. Set the group created in step 4 above. Leave all other fields unchanged in the Assign dialogue.
12. Click "OK" to change the Group to which the selected group participants are assigned.
13. Clear your selection.

NOTE: Any children who need to be held back can have their individual Group Participant records edited.
TIP:  This is a great time to review the promotion settings for any age-based Groups (babies through 4 years old).

Alternative Approach

Some churches have more complex promotion rules and/or have a "Sunday school" model (Groups based around a progression of classes not always tied to age or grade). If you need to explicitly promote some Participants from one Group to another and using the Promotion routine or renaming Groups is not an option, please view our Alternate Group Promotion article.

See Also: Routines, Promotion Routine, Promotion for Babies Through Preschool