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Academic terms define the school year windows that Zion uses to group goals, scores, and reports. Every school has one term marked current at a time, and that term is what grading, Goal Check, and reporting anchor to. Only administrators manage academic terms.
Academic terms list showing start date, end date, and current term flag

The academic terms list with the current term marked.

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Why terms matter

A term is not just a label. Reports, Goal Check history, and grade summaries are all read against your school’s current term. If no term is configured, features that depend on a term window have nothing to anchor to, so setting up at least one term is a prerequisite for reporting to make sense.
Only the administrator role can create, edit, delete, lock, or set the current term. Supervisors, monitors, teaching staff, parents, and students do not have access to Academic Terms.

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Term fields

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Creating a term

1

Open Academic Terms

Go to Academic Terms in the sidebar, under Administration.
2

Click Create New Term

Enter a name and a start and end date.
3

Submit

Zion rejects a term whose date range overlaps an existing term.

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Setting the current term

Only one term can be current at a time. Clicking Set as current on a term clears the current flag from every other term first, so there is never a moment with two current terms.
If no term has been explicitly set as current, the app falls back to whichever term’s date window contains today’s date. Once you explicitly set a current term, that flag takes precedence over the date-window fallback.

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Locking a term

An administrator can lock a term once it is finished, for example ahead of generating report cards, to stop any further changes landing inside it.
1

Open Academic Terms

Go to Academic Terms in the sidebar, under Administration.
2

Lock the term

Click Lock on the term you want to close out. A Locked badge appears next to it.
3

Unlock if you need to make a correction

Click Unlock on a locked term to allow entries into it again, for example to fix a mistake.
Once a term is locked, Zion refuses any new goal, attendance, or grade entry dated inside that term’s window, whichever term is marked current. Locking does not affect anything you already generated, such as report cards, only new entries going forward.

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Editing and deleting terms

Administrators can edit a term’s name or dates from Academic Terms, subject to the same overlap check used at creation. Deleting a term is blocked if the term has goals or scores linked to it. This keeps historical goal and grade data from being lost. To remove a term that has data attached, address the linked goals or scores first.

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What a term drives

Goal Check

Daily goals and progress are recorded against the current term.

Grading

Score entry and grade summaries are scoped to the current term.

Report cards

Report generation reads the current term to determine the reporting period.

Students

PACE assignments and student records reference the academic calendar terms define.