School years, and moving between them
Almost everything in Bowerstead belongs to a school year rather than to the calendar. Understanding that one idea explains most of what you’ll see, including why a screen sometimes looks emptier than you expected.
What belongs to a year
Subjects, terms, breaks, your weekly rhythm, captures, attendance, grades, and each child’s enrollment and grade level. All of it is filed under one school year. Your family name, your state, and your list of children are the exceptions: those belong to the account and carry across every year.
This is why a child’s grade level is recorded per year rather than once. A transcript needs to know they were in Grade 9 that year and Grade 10 the next, and a single current value could not say so.
Switching between years
The school year selector sits in the app’s frame and stays with you as you move between screens, so Planner, Records, and Children are always showing the same year as each other. Change it in one place and everything follows.
The selected year also travels in the address of the page you’re on. That’s deliberate: it means a page you left open, reloaded, or came back to still shows the year you chose rather than quietly resetting to the current one.
Looking at a past year
Select it and read normally. Old years stay readable, and their records and exports keep working, which is the point of keeping them. Take the usual care that anything you type while an old year is selected lands in that year, because it will.
Starting a new year
Create the new year from Planner. Set it up in whatever depth you want and it becomes the year the app shows you by default.
Nothing copies across on its own. Last year’s captures, grades, and attendance stay in last year, where they belong, and the new one starts genuinely empty. That is not a gap: a year that inherited last year’s evidence would make every record you export slightly untrue.
Each child’s grade level for the new year is set as part of creating it, so a change applies to the new year without rewriting the history of the old one.
Frequently asked questions
Does anything carry over when I start a new year? Your children and your account settings do. Captures, grades and attendance do not: they stay in the year they happened in, and the new year starts genuinely empty so that every record you export stays true.
Can I still edit a year that has finished? Yes. Select it and work normally. The one thing to watch is that anything you type while an older year is selected lands in that year, because it will.
Why does a screen look emptier than I expected? Almost always because the school year selector is on a different year from the one you have in mind. Planner, Records and Children all follow that one control, so changing it back fills the screen again.
Where to go next
Subjects and your week covers setting up a year once you’ve created it.