Confirming Returning Students

Next year’s student list is not created automatically. It is copied forward in one action, then confirmed family by family.

Required Access

Admissions — Edit

Running the rollover requires Admissions — Edit. Setting students to Enrolled requires Admissions — Admin. Entering the new year’s dates requires Year / Calendar Settings — Edit.

Next year’s student list starts out empty. The student rollover populates it in a single pass: every student enrolled this year is copied into next year, advanced one grade, with a starting status that you select. Re-enrollment is then a matter of advancing each student’s status as their family confirms.

The rollover is run partway through the current year, not when the new year begins. Re-enrollment, payment contracts and next year’s class schedules are all built on next year’s student list, so the list has to exist while that work is under way. Mosaic prompts for it on the home dashboard at the right time.

Overview of the process

Four steps, in this order. The first is a short piece of setup, the second is a single action, and the third occupies most of the re-enrollment period.

1. Fill in the dates for the new year.
2. Run the rollover from the reminder on the home dashboard, early in the year (from 60 days after the first day of class).
3. Confirm each family and change their status as they respond.
4. Handle the exceptions — students not returning, students who enroll after the rollover, and students it could not carry.

Step 1 — Fill in the dates for the new year

In most cases the year does not need to be created. Mosaic maintains two years ahead: each time a school’s current year is set, it creates the following two years if they do not already exist, carrying forward the naming pattern, the fiscal start and end dates, the number of terms, and the term codes from the year being set.

What it cannot supply is your calendar. Go to Settings ▸ School Years, open next year from the list, and complete the Marking Periods panel, entering for each term:

• Start, Mid, and End dates.
• Days — the number of instructional days in the term.

Review the Details panel at the same time. The fiscal start and end dates were copied from the previous year with the year number incremented, so they are approximately correct but should be verified — a school that has moved its start date will need to amend them. The panel displays a red warning while any required field remains incomplete.

These dates are not merely administrative. Attendance, report cards, the withdrawal tool, and every calculation in Mosaic that depends on whether a date falls within the school year all read them, and several of those fail silently when the dates are missing.

If next year is not listed

A year is absent only where no current year has been set since it would have been created — most often at a new school. Click New on Settings ▸ School Years and supply a name, fiscal start and end dates, and the number of terms, then complete the marking periods as above.

Do not change the current year yet

The Set Current Year button determines which year every user is placed in on signing in. Do not use it while you are only preparing: selecting the year in the year chooser is sufficient for all preparatory work. Set the new year as current when the school actually transitions to it.

Step 2 — Run the rollover

Sixty days after the first day of class, a Student Rollover Needed reminder appears on the home dashboard of every user with Admissions — Edit. That is early on purpose: conversations with families about next year usually begin in the first semester, and next year’s enrollment status cannot be recorded until next year has a student list. Students who enroll after the rollover are carried forward later, one by one; see Students who enroll after the rollover. There is no need to change years: you stay in the current year throughout.

Click Run Student Rollover on the reminder. The dialog opens on the dashboard, states the two years involved — Copy from this year, Copy to next year — and requests a single decision:

New status — the status every copied student begins with. The default is Returning unconfirmed, which is the appropriate choice for most schools. See Choosing the starting status below.

Click Student rollover to run it. Next year’s student list is populated and the reminder disappears. Nothing in the current year changes, so classes, grades and attendance carry on as before.

If someone else on the team owns the rollover, choose I will handle this from the reminder’s menu (the arrow beside Remind me later). The reminder is then hidden from the other administrators, and it comes back for everyone after 14 days if the rollover still has not been run.

When the reminder looks different

• Next year has not been created. The reminder says so, and its button opens Settings ▸ School Years instead. Create the year (see Step 1), and the reminder then offers the rollover.
• The reminder is red. The school was switched to the new year before the rollover was run, so last year’s enrolled students have no record in the year now in use and are missing from its student lists. Run the rollover from the reminder straight away; it copies them into the current year. It can be put off for a few days, but not dismissed for good, until this is done.

Running it before the reminder appears

To roll over earlier than the reminder, select next year with the year chooser in the top bar — the calendar icon showing the year name, displayed in bold red whenever the selected year is not the school’s current year. Then go to Students, where a banner reads You have not yet completed the student rollover this year, and click Student rollover. The dialog and the result are the same. Working in the coming year requires the Year Access permission, but not its highest level: View Past Years already grants full access to the coming year.

If no students are copied

The rollover advances each student by following the Next grade level code set on their grade. That is one-time setup, completed when the school’s grade levels were first configured; where it was never finished, there is nothing for the rollover to follow and no students are copied. Mosaic reports this rather than recording the rollover as complete:

No students were copied, so the year has not been marked rolled over. Check that every grade level names the grade students move up into, under School Settings ▸ Grade Levels.

The year is deliberately left unflagged, so the reminder remains. Correct the grade levels under Settings ▸ School ▸ Grade Levels — each grade requires either a next grade level code or Graduating = Yes — and run the rollover again.

What the rollover copies

Last year’s status	Carried forward?	Arrives as
Enrolled	Yes, one grade higher	The status you chose · category Returning student
Homeschool	Yes, one grade higher	Homeschool · category No
Applied, Accepted, Waitlist	No	—
Withdrawn, Inactive, Transfer	No	—
Any student in a Graduating grade	No	—

Students who already have a record in the new year — an applicant created there in advance, or a student already marked inactive for next year — are left unchanged. No student is duplicated, and no decision already recorded is overwritten.

What the rollover does not do

It copies enrollment records only, plus each student’s section letter, provisionally (see Next year’s sections). It does not create classes, build schedules, assign homerooms, carry forward bus routes, or generate payment contracts. Each of those is a separate task with its own rollover or setup step.

Nor does it read any indication recorded during the current year that a student will not be returning. The Enrollment Category field — Maybe, No — exists for forecasting and is not consulted when copying. Students known to be leaving are addressed in Step 4.

The rollover runs once per year, and may safely be repeated

Once the rollover succeeds, the year is flagged and the reminder no longer appears. Where it copied no students, the flag is deliberately withheld so that the cause can be corrected and the rollover run again. A second run never duplicates a student who already has a record.

Choosing the starting status

The New status field determines the status of the entire cohort at the point the new year’s records begin.

Choice	Use it when
Returning unconfirmed (default)	Each family will be asked to confirm. This is the usual case.
Returning confirmed	Re-enrollment is already settled — for example, a contract period completed before the rollover.
Enrolled	Every re-enrollment requirement has already been completed. A student is set to Enrolled once they have completed theirs, so this applies only to a cohort that completed them before the rollover was run.

Setting the entire cohort to Enrolled appears to save work, but it discards the distinction the rest of the process depends on: with every student already enrolled, the Admissions page cannot show which families have responded and which have not.

Step 3 — Confirm each family

Work through the list as families respond, advancing each student’s status.

A common convention, and the one the statuses are named for:

• Returning unconfirmed → Returning confirmed when the family confirms — by signing the contract, paying the registration fee, or by whichever act your school treats as the commitment.
• Returning confirmed → Enrolled when the year begins and the student attends.

Some schools combine the two and move directly to Enrolled on confirmation. Either approach is valid, provided it is applied consistently.

Updating one student

Open the student’s profile, go to the Enrollment tab, and edit the Enrollment panel for the year. Change Status, and set the Section and Homeroom at the same time if your school places students as they confirm.

Updating a group

The Admissions page is designed for this. Go to Students ▸ Admissions and click In process, which lists every student who holds a place but is not yet enrolled. Filter by grade if you are working through one grade at a time, select the students who have confirmed, and click Change status.

The bulk change sets the status only. Sections, homerooms, and categories are set per student.

Enrolled requires the Admin level

Only a user with Admissions — Admin can set a status to Enrolled, individually or in bulk. At the Edit level the change is not applied and Mosaic displays a warning. Office staff can normally advance students to Returning confirmed without assistance; the final change to Enrolled may require a supervisor.

Monitoring progress

The Enrollment Status grid on Students ▸ Admissions gives the clearest view of progress: one row per grade, one column per status, with every cell linking to the students it counts. The movement from the Returning unconfirmed column to Returning confirmed shows the state of the whole re-enrollment period on one screen.

Two reports supplement it:

• Students ▸ Reports ▸ Student Statistics carries a Retention table — eligible to return, returned, not returned, and the rate — by division. It counts a student as returned only where their status is Enrolled, so it will report a low figure until confirmed students are moved to Enrolled at the start of the year.
• Students ▸ Reports ▸ New and Withdrawn Students lists the arrivals and departures for the year, with dates and withdrawal reasons.

Step 4 — Handle the exceptions

Students who are not returning

Do not delete these students, and do not simply set the status to Inactive. Use the Withdraw student tool on the student’s Enrollment tab, in the current year, and select one of:

• Inactive next year — the student completes this year and does not return.
• Early completion — the student finishes ahead of schedule, but the year still counts as complete.

Either option leaves the current year unchanged and marks the student inactive for next year, creating next year’s record if the rollover has not yet run, or updating it if it has. The withdrawal date, reason, and comment are recorded in one place, which is what the New and Withdrawn report depends on. Full detail is given in Withdraw a Student.

Students who enroll after the rollover

Because the rollover runs early in the year, families who enroll after it (at the semester break, or later) have no record in next year. There is no second rollover to remember. Mosaic tracks them: while any such student exists, a Students Missed by the Rollover reminder appears on the home dashboard for users with Admissions — Edit.

Click Review students. The dialog lists every student enrolled this year who has no record of any kind in next year:

• Ticked students are carried forward to their next grade level, exactly as the rollover would, with the status you choose.
• Unticked students are recorded as Inactive in next year — not continuing.

Either way each student is resolved, which is what clears the reminder. It keeps checking for the first 60 days of the new year too, so a student who enrolled in the last weeks of the old one is not lost.

A grade the rollover cannot carry

A student is carried forward only if their grade names a Next grade level that exists, or is marked Graduating = Yes (then they are not carried, by design). If one grade has neither, its students are skipped by the rollover and are not in the catch-up list either. Settings ▸ School ▸ Setup Health flags such a grade ahead of time (Grade levels name the next grade), and the rollover warns again if it still finds one. Fix the grade under Settings ▸ School ▸ Grade Levels; its students then appear in the catch-up list to carry forward. A program students deliberately stay in from year to year can be marked reviewed on Setup Health instead.

Next year’s sections

At a school with more than one section per grade (3A, 3B), the rollover copies each student’s section letter into next year as a starting point. Whether next year keeps those letters is decided later: from about six weeks into the second semester, a Confirm next year’s sections reminder appears for users with Admissions — Edit or Schedule Admin. Its dialog lists each grade with this year’s and next year’s letters, and offers:

• Keep: every returning student gets this year’s letter again.
• Clear: nobody in the grade has a section, so new ones can be assigned (for a school that mixes its sections each year).
• Leave as is: no change.

Each row shows how many students the choice changes. The review can be run again at any time from the Sections tab of the Students home page (Sections from last year), and the last run wins. A student carried forward by the catch-up keeps their letter, unless their grade was cleared.

Students not included in the rollover

Some students are absent from the new year by design: a student who withdrew mid-year and is returning, a student returning after a year away, or an applicant created in the wrong year. For each of them:

1. Select the new year.
2. Open the student’s profile and go to the Enrollment tab.
3. Click New Enrollment Record and set the grade, status, and category.

Their person, family, and history are unaffected; only the missing year is being added.

Students repeating a grade

The rollover advances every student according to the grade-level mapping; it does not take retention decisions into account. After the rollover, edit those students’ Enrollment panel in the new year and correct the grade.

Billing does not require Enrolled status

A payment contract can be generated for any student whose status is Enrolled, Returning confirmed, Returning unconfirmed, Accepted, or Withdrawn midyear. Applicants and inactive students are excluded.

Contract preparation and confirmation can therefore proceed in parallel: set the year’s rates and generate contracts for the rolled-over cohort without waiting for every family to respond. At many schools, the signed contract is the confirmation.

What comes next

With the student list in place, the remainder of the year’s setup can proceed:

• Classes and rosters — build the year’s classes and place students; see Modify Class Roster.
• Calendar — copy recurring events into the new year with Rollover Events.
• New applicants — see New Student Admissions.
• Setup Health — Settings ▸ School ▸ Setup Health has an annual section that re-checks each year: term dates, students enrolled, guardians on file, classes with teachers and rooms, students without a homeroom, and more. See Setup Health.
• Release the year to families — under Settings ▸ User Access, once schedules and rosters are largely finalized, so that families can see the new year’s academic records.

FAQ

The rollover banner is gone but no students were copied.

That combination should not occur: where the rollover copies no students, it leaves the year unflagged so that the banner remains. If the banner is absent and the year is genuinely empty, confirm the year shown in the header. An empty list is usually a year other than the one rolled into.

Can I run the rollover twice?

Yes, while the reminder or banner is still displayed. Students who already have a record in the new year are skipped, so a second run adds only what the first did not — the intended behavior once the cause of the first failure has been corrected.

Why is a student in the wrong grade?

The rollover uses the Next grade level code on the grade the student was in. If an entire grade is incorrect, that field is incorrect: correct it under Settings ▸ School ▸ Grade Levels for future years, and amend this year’s students on their Enrollment panel. If a single student is affected, they are most likely repeating or skipping a grade; edit their record directly.

What happens to graduating students?

Nothing, which is the intended behavior. A grade marked Graduating = Yes has no next grade, so its students are not copied into the new year. Their record for the year in which they graduated remains unchanged.

Do homeschool students roll over?

Yes. Students with the Homeschool status are carried forward as Homeschool, advanced one grade, with the category No. They are not given the status selected for the rest of the cohort.

Where is the rollover button? The reminder is not visible.

The Student Rollover Needed reminder appears on the home dashboard from 60 days after the first day of class, and only for users with Admissions — Edit. Before then, or if it has been snoozed, select next year in the year chooser and use the banner on the Students home page instead. That banner appears only where the selected year has not yet been rolled over and a prior year exists to copy from. Its button also requires Admissions — Edit; at the View level the banner is visible but the button is not.