About Scheduling

Spark gives you several tools for organizing your school's calendar, schedules, and events. Together, these tools help you define your school year, schedule classes and activities, manage school-wide events, and share schedules with students, guardians, and staff.

The main scheduling tools are:

• Sessions — Define the periods of time your school operates, such as semesters, quarters, or program offerings.
• Academic Calendar — Manage the dates within your Sessions, including school days, holidays, breaks, and other important dates.
• Event Calendar — Create and manage school-wide events and activities.
• Daily Scheduler — Build detailed daily and weekly schedules for classes, activities, and events.

Sessions

Sessions are the foundation of Spark's scheduling structure. They define the specific periods of time your school operates and provide a way to organize schedules, enrollments, and other school records.

Each Session includes the calendar structure for that period, including:

• Start and end dates
• In-session days
• Holidays and breaks
• Other important calendar dates

Sessions can be standalone or organized within an Academic Year or Program. These act as umbrellas for grouping multiple sessions. For example:

• 2026–2027 Academic Year
  • Session: "Fall Semester"
  • Session: "Spring Semester"
• Enrichment Program
  • Session: "Art Class, Fall 2026"
  • Session: "Music Class, Fall 2026"
  • Session: "STEM Class, Spring 2027"

You can use Academic Years, Programs, or both, depending on how your school is organized.

Sessions also provide an important way to organize and filter information throughout Spark. Many areas of the system can be filtered by Session, Program, or Academic Year, making it easier to view schedules, enrollments, and records for a specific period or group of periods.

To learn more, see the Sessions help doc ->

Academic Calendar

Once you've created your Sessions and organized them within an Academic Year or Program, go to the Academic Calendar to manage the dates that make up your Sessions.

Each day within a Session can be assigned a day type, such as:

• School Day
• Holiday
• Break
• Teacher Workday
• Testing Day
• Field Trip Day

Day types can be customized to fit your school's needs. They can also determine whether a day counts as an in-session day and how instructional hours are counted.

The Academic Calendar gives you a visual overview of your school's academic schedule and helps keep your Sessions organized.

To learn more, see the Academic Calendar help doc ->

Event Calendar

Once your school’s key dates are configured through Sessions and the Academic Calendar, use the Event Calendar to schedule events that involve the entire school or a significant portion of the school community.

Examples include:

• First Day of School
• Parent-Teacher Conferences
• School Picture Day
• Music Concerts
• No School Days

Events can also be added to the Academic Calendar or Daily Scheduler, allowing the same event to appear in different scheduling views.

Events can also be shared with staff, students, and guardians, and printed or downloaded in a calendar view.

To learn more, see the Event Calendar help doc ->

Daily Scheduler

The Daily Scheduler is where you build and manage your school's daily and weekly schedule.

Use the Scheduler for things such as:

• Classes
• Lunch and recess
• Chapel
• Activities
• School events
• Other recurring parts of the school day

The Scheduler displays one week at a time and can be organized by Session, Academic Year, or Program. It can be managed school-wide or within individual Classrooms.

To learn more, see the Daily Scheduler help doc ->

Attendance and Scheduling

Scheduling and attendance are connected in Spark. When Attendance is required for a class, activity, or event, it can appear in the Attendance section for the selected participants.

Sharing & Printing

Sharing

Schedules and events can be available to staff, students, and guardians on their portals depending on the visibility settings and whether the associated Session is open to students and guardians.

Events can also be emailed to guardians and then exported to their personal calendars.

Printing and Downloading

Spark provides printing and PDF options for each of the main scheduling views. See the associated help docs for detailed instructions and configuration options.

• Academic Calendar: Prints all months in the selected Session(s) on a single page, with color-coding to show different day types, such as school days, holidays, and breaks.
• Event Calendar: Prints one month per page, providing more space to display events within each date.
• Daily Scheduler: Prints a sample week of the daily schedule, making it easy to share schedules with students, guardians, or staff.

How the Scheduling Tools Work Together

The scheduling tools are designed to work together rather than as completely separate calendars.

For example, you might:

1. Create an Academic Year or Program to organize your school.
2. Create Sessions for the periods within that structure.
3. Set up the Academic Calendar for each Session with school days, holidays, breaks, and other important dates.
4. Create events on the Event Calendar for school-wide activities.
5. Build the Daily Schedule with classes, activities, and recurring schedule blocks.
6. Choose which calendars each item appears on so information is available in the appropriate views.
7. Share schedules and events with staff, students, and guardians.

Together, these tools give you a complete picture of when your school is in session, what is happening, and what students and staff are scheduled to do each day.