Don’t you just love when people say:

“Oh, you work during the summer? That must be nice and relaxing with no students around.”

Could anything be further from the truth?

Summer can be the busiest time for technology and SIS staff. Any new changes—software, hardware, upgrades—have to be implemented, tested, and ready for the day everyone walks back in and logs back onto the networks.

SIS Data Cleanup

One of the most overlooked pieces to setting your year up for success is data cleanup. How do you handle that? What does clean data look like?

My goal was always to:

1. Remove duplicate students and guardians

2. Review staff movement, licenses, and permissions

3. Use the practice period to run state reports early and often

4. Prep for smoother data transfers to other platforms

Remove duplicate students and guardians

A tough manual process if your SIS doesn’t have the tools to help. OnCourse districts can use tools like Duplicate Detection to clean up student data and Address Validator to verify address accuracy against USPS database.

Keep a fresh handle on staff movement

It’s important to deactivate and reclaim the licenses from staff who are leaving, and add all your new staff. For returning staff it is still crucial to review all resource groups, permissions, and group members. You never want to give more access than what was needed.

Run state reports

Always take advantage of practice periods and push reports to the state and check for errors, warnings, or conflicts. With NJSLEDS officially opening for the 2025-26 school year on September 2nd, clean reporting data isn’t optional anymore—it’s expected. The old school way of thinking about state reporting data was: “I’ll clean it up in NJSMART.” Now the new way is “If it’s not clean in my SIS, it’s not clean anywhere.”

That shift matters. NJSLEDS doesn’t let you band-aid bad data after the fact. If your SIS doesn’t give you the tools and support to verify data in your system, this process will only becoming more challenging.

From August 1-29, the NJDOE will incorporate feedback from the soft launch to make updates will focus on system logic, user interface, error messaging, training materials, and Help Desk preparation.

In our latest webinar, OnCourse state reporting team and the NJ DOE staff shared best practices for a smooth transition from NJSMART to NJSLEDS this fall.

You can watch that here.

Watch the full webinar in OnCourse University.

OnCourse SIS districts can stay up to date on everything NJ state reporting by subscribing to our newsletter.

Don’t Forget Your Other Systems

While cleaning up the SIS was a high priority, many other software platforms required the same attention. Everything boils down to, student data, staff data, licensing, and permissions.

And when you integrate and send data to outside software vendors via SFTP, clean SIS data becomes that much more important.

Every workflow in OnCourse, from enrollment to scheduling to grading, was designed with data validation in mind. Our philosophy is to keep bad data from getting into the system in the first place, rather than catching and cleaning data later. See why other New Jersey districts are switching to OnCourse SIS.