How To: Calculate Instructional Days and Instructional Time
Background on the School Calendar and Bell Schedule Domains
Instructional Days and/or Instructional Time are common requirements for state reporting for schools. The Ed-Fi model has two domains designed to store this data: School Calendar and Bell Schedule.
School Calendar Domain
In Ed-Fi v3.1, school days are defined by two main entities: Calendar and CalendarDate. A calendar holds a set of dates for a school within a school year. A school can have multiple calendars when those dates vary by type or grade level. For example, a school may have a student calendar that holds dates associated with student attendance and another staff calendar which would include additional dates for staff development. The School Calendar domain model is fundamentally enumerative: All dates of note (e.g., all instructional dates) are listed as part of the calendar in CalendarEvent.
The CalendarEvent entity identifies a date, a type of activity for the date (e.g., instructional day, holiday, make-up day), and a reference to the calendar to which the calendar event applies. A single date can have multiple calendar event records. For instance, if there were a bad weather delay on January 4th, there would be two records in CalendarEvent for January 4th: "Student late arrival/early dismissal" and "Instructional day". All days are considered "whole days" for this model. Partial days are covered by the Bell Schedule domain.
Calendar and CalendarEvent Model
Bell Schedule Domain
The Bell Schedule domain represents the start time and duration of one or more class periods in a day or over a course of days. A fully realized bell schedule for a school will include the dates and all the class period meeting times throughout a school year. A class period does not have to meet every day. Specific meeting days are defined in the Date element on the BellSchedule entity. This allows a school to have a bell schedule that is special for a specific day, such as for a testing day or a late-start day, or to have multiple bell schedules defined on the same calendar time period (e.g., for different grades). The Bell Schedule domain does not currently include a place to store non-instructional time (e.g., lunch, passing time, breaks).
Bell Schedule Model
Use Cases
The following use cases represent general, common requests for business analysts at a state or local education agency that need to calculate the total instructional days, total time per day, and total instructional time in minutes for a school in a school year to satisfy state reporting requirements. They may also provide insight into Student Information Systems on how to correctly submit data about instructional days and time to the Ed-Fi Core Student Data API. Note that these use cases are illustrative, not exhaustive: they outline a few high-value uses cases and do not cover all possible use cases.