Every summer there are at two questions often asked by children’s and youth directors:
1) Who are all our new kindergartners?
2) Who are our new ninth graders? (In other words, who is now eligible to attend senior high youth activities?)
We want to start preparing in the summer to get our children and youth promoted to the appropriate activities in time for all the fall programs. With the RDS Activity module, this is a simple task and once established can easily be maintained every year.
Sunday school classes are usually promoted in the fall or late summer. Graduating seniors are usually promoted to a college-age class, 11th graders to 12th grade, 10th graders to 11th grade, and so on. Some churches have mixed classes for their Sunday School students, especially in the summer when attendance might be lower. Perhaps all the high school students attend the same class. Or maybe 7th and 8th graders are grouped together. How do we know who is moving up?
One way to keep track of this is through the use of the RDS “Activities” module. Because an “activity” is any way we want to group people together, the Activities module is an easy way to keep track of everyone’s grade in school, and it has the added benefit of allowing us to keep track of what school students attend in the “Position” field. This is useful for youth directors who want to plan activities for students based on geographic areas. For example, there might be a skating party at ABC Skating Rink for children on the north side of town one week, and another skating party at XYZ Skating Rink for children on the south side of town.
For example, set up activities GRD00 (kindergarten), GRD01 (first grade), GRD02 (second grade), and so on, up through GRD12 (high school seniors). You could set up GRD13 as an activity to which to promote graduating seniors. Give each of these activities a type of GRADE and a sub-type of ELEM, MIDDL, HIGH, or whatever you wish. There are almost unlimited reports and communication tools based upon this information.
Contact your RDS Support Team if you would like assistance in setting this up.
