Scoir Back-to-School Checklist for Counselors

Another school year is beginning! ☀️ As you plan for the upcoming school year, we'd like to share some helpful back-to-school Scoir housekeeping items. Completing this checklist will help to ensure you are prepared to use Scoir for your college and career-bound students this school year!

Scoir's Back-to-School Checklist

Want a super simple checklist to refer to? Check out this PDF version of the items we cover in this blog post. 

1. Housekeeping

2. Student Engagement

✅ Housekeeping

Every year, your Scoir instance will likely need a fall cleaning! Here are the things we recommend checking in on:

1. Configure your School Account & Settings

First, take a pass at your settings, including School Reports, Letters of Recommendation, College Lists, and Acceptance Data. If this is your first year with school, go through this list to ensure your Scoir instance is configured how you want it.

✅ You'll want to enable Application Materials, if you haven’t already, and update your documents and templates

✅ Enable Advanced Email by registering your domain. This will allow you to email students via Scoir, regardless of their registration status!

✅ Determine when students should gain access to the PrinciplesYou Character Assessment. We recommend Sophomore year!

2. Add/Update your data in Data Management

This is a great chance to ensure your student roster, transcripts, and faculty are up to date in Scoir.

✅ Import SAT/ACT Score Reports. This information helps students and parents understand acceptance likelihood and powers Scattergrams!

✅ If you’re a Clever school, remove your “marked for deletion” students and maintain this throughout the year

✅ Update GPAs along with your Student Roster. Schools not syncing with Clever or ClassLink can easily bulk-upload GPAs!

3. Invite new Faculty and Assign Counselors to students

Assigning Counselors ensures Students can add colleges to their My Colleges lists! Don't forget to delete any faculty members who have left!

4. Configure your Calendar settings and availability for Visits and Office Hours

Configure your Calendar settings and availability for Visits and Office Hours now so you don't have to think about it again during the busy school year.

5. Learn about applying with Scoir

The First-Year Applicant Guide and the Supporter Toolkit are great places to learn about Apply with Scoir. 

6. Stay up-to-date on Scoir training

We're always improving Scoir! Review the training videos below, and ensure you're signed up for the What’s New in Scoir email list so you will be informed of all the new features Scoir has as we head into the Fall.

✅ Review our Online Training Library and share it with any new counselors

✅ Sign up for upcoming live trainings

✅ Review past on-demand trainings

Rolling out Scoir to new students this fall? Our Scoir Day Guidelines provide a lesson plan for the day you introduce your students to Scoir.

✅ Student Engagement

Scoir has handy features to help you save time on communications, curriculum building, and task management with students and parents/guardians. 

1. Review Scoir’s College Readiness Curriculum

It includes comprehensive, ASCA-compliant lesson plans for grades 9-12! Reach out to your Customer Success Manager for the link.

2. Explore updates to Communication Tools

See what we released over the summer on the What's New in Scoir blog, or check out the links below.

✅ Advanced and Scheduled Email

✅ Subscribe to Scoir Library categories for your students

✅ Learn how to Create Plans, Forms, and Assign Tasks to Students to save time and increase student engagement. Rather than manually creating and assigning individual tasks for students each year, use Plans to create, edit, publish, and repurpose a plan of recurring Tasks and Forms that are automatically assigned and can be reused year over year

3. Refamiliarize yourself with the Counselor Dashboard

You’ll always have the Helpful Links section on your Dashboard on the right-hand side of the main Scoir screen!

4. Reintroduce (or roll out for the first time) Scoir to your students

Ensure students log in using their existing Scoir accounts. You can find their registered email on the Student Roster.

✅ Share Class Checklists with your students

✅ Download the Scoir Counselor App and encourage students and parents/guardians to download their apps

✅ Re-invite unregistered students

6. Follow Scoir on Instagram and subscribe to our podcast

...and encourage your students to do the same! We share helpful tips and content for students throughout the school year on Instagram and tidbits for counselors and students on our podcast!

Here are our most popular episodes of late:

• Navigating College Choices: Counselor Tips for Student and Parent/Guardian Harmony
• 5 Essential To-Dos Before Junior Year
• 5 Essential To-Dos Before Senior Year

Want to learn more about how to use Scoir to save time on admin so you can spend more time supporting students? Check out this blog post next: How to Use Scoir to Optimize Your Counseling Responsibilities.

We wish you a smooth start to the new year, and feel free to connect with our team with any questions! 🙂 💙

This article was originally published on July 31, 2020. It was updated on July 30, 2024 for accuracy and comprehensiveness.