Calendar invites for each class period have begun to show up for students and faculty during the first weeks of school. This is no accident: the IT Department was hard at work on this innovation over the summer to help members of the St. Louis U. High community manage the new schedule more easily.

“We've had the idea for a very long time, but haven't necessarily had a method to do it,” said Director of Information Technology Jon Dickmann. “We've had the ability to push things out to Google Calendar because the school day schedule has been run by a program that we wrote that Dr. Kesterson uses to push out the calendar. We’ve been using that for years, but part of the problem was that we often didn't have all of the different pieces of the rotation and the schedule digitized in a way that we could actually reference it.”

The goal was for each SLUH student and teacher to have each of his or her classes and meetings automatically show up on Google Calendar. In the past, IT has used a system called SLUH Aware to manage the schedule through support.sluh.org. They have considered adding the Google Calendar element, but they never felt it completely necessary until this year with the new schedule.

“We could have made a schedule on the support website where we have SLUH Aware already, where we were making changes to it to reflect the new schedule. But ultimately, we decided that if we could do it in Google Calendar, it'd be a lot easier for most people to use,” said Dickmann.

The system of calendar invites relies on a code to take class lists from Powerschool and create the calendar invites for each member of the class. Junior Thad Berta, who works with IT over the summer, played a large part in writing this code.

“It's basically a system that hooks into PowerSchool and loops through all of the class sections,” said Berta. “For every section, it grabs all the students and the teacher who are part of that section. And then it crosses over with the current day's schedule and finds out the period letters and when that class will be meeting. And then it makes an event on Google calendar at that time with all those people, the students and teachers. So then everybody can see it on their own calendars.”

This new innovation to scheduling at SLUH is significant given the progress that has been made in the past several years.

“When I started here, we had a printed schedule of what rooms were available at what time,” said Dickmann. “You had to have a bell schedule and a rotation and the calendar for this month just to see if a room was available or a teacher was available. We built the original SLUH Aware to digitize and process all of that so you wouldn't have to figure out astrological signs just to see if a teacher is available or if a room is available. We've evolved on that continually as we've gone.”