Dear PA FBLA Advisers
National FBLA has been testing and has developed a process to automatically "promote" prior year FBLA members to the next grade level! This should be a big help to all advisers with returning FBLA members and enable advisers to skip one step in having to adjust each member's record to promote them to the next grade level. Even better, it will take last year's Grade 12 members and promote them to a "graduated" status.
What does this mean? If a chapter has two hundred current members, they wouldn't need to click "edit" two hundred times to manually change the grade levels. National FBLA could just run that process for them.
Advisers would be able to look at the group of "graduated" students and verify that the list is accurate. If any are not, the adviser can adjust those grade levels for impacted students. Even better, if the adviser deems the "graduated" group is accurate, National FBLA could run a separate process to disconnect them from the chapter so that you would not need to see them anymore and advisers would not need to use the individual "remove" button for each graduated member.
Important Concerns:
All of this work would need to be run "after hours." This is to avoid updating students at the same time that the adviser is in the system, doing double duty, possibly meeting with error messages.
If a student does not actually proceed to the next grade level at their school, the adviser can always edit that individual in Manage Students and change the grade level back.
National FBLA is ready to run this process after hours (today, I assume) on Pennsylvania FBLA chapters. I gave the OK to do that. At this point, do not do any work (if you are) to update student grade levels or hide/remove them. Let National FBLA do that work and you do something else.
I will let you know when the process is complete so that you can look at your memberships and determine if the "graduated" students are the ones who are no longer with your chapter. If you see that true, please let Bruce Boncal know and I will inform National FBLA to disconnect them from your chapter.
