Welcome Back to School 26/27
August 14, 2026
Welcome back to school! As we kick off the 2026-2027 school year, we wanted to take a moment to highlight some of our recent updates and share a few helpful back-to-school tips. Here’s a quick look at what’s new and what to keep in mind as you get settled into the new school year!
- SSO Account Creation Email Preference: Administrative users can now control whether emails will be sent to new SSO users upon account creation. Learn more.
- Copy User Roles: We are in the process of rolling out new functionality that allows administrative users to create new user roles by copying an existing user role. Learn more.
- Calendar Management Tools: Administrative users can now copy calendars to other buildings. Additionally, calendars now merge when buildings are merged. Learn more.
- Acknowledgement of Receipt: We are in the process of rolling out a new Acknowledgement of Receipt workflow to districts on the PRO edition of SameGoal. This workflow will allow staff to sign off that they’ve received and reviewed required documentation. Learn more.
- Integration Management Coming Soon: Soon, integration information will be moved from District Information to the Data Imports/Exports page to make it easier to manage integrations and increase the visibility of integration statuses. Learn more.
- Update Your Notification Preferences: SameGoal has several different notification types that can be delivered via in-app ‘bell’, web push, or email. Update your notification preferences to control how you will receive each notification type.
- Users on the PRO edition of SameGoal can now receive deadline notifications, which act as a reminder for upcoming and past due deadlines.
- Manage Your Caseload:
- On a document list page, use the Documents filter and uncheck Not Owner to search for documents you own. Optionally, use other filters or copy and paste in a list of student IDs to refine the search further. Bulk share documents as needed, including transferring document ownership to other users.
- You can send document access requests to document owners. This allows you to request access to documents you currently have no permissions for or request a higher level of access to documents you have at least View access to.
- If you receive a permission request, review it to approve or deny the request. Alternatively, you may choose to grant a different level of access than what was requested.
- If you have lost access to documents you are listed as the owner of (e.g. if a student has moved to a building where you do not have permissions), even if you can no longer edit/view the documents, you will have retained document ownership. This means that you will still be able to share the documents in order to transfer ownership to the new caseload manager.
- Attend Refresher Training: Register for one of our upcoming General Functionality refresher training sessions on the Events page. If you are unable to make it, you can review our list of Recent Webinars and watch a recording.
- Update Calendars: Update the district and building calendars as needed. It’s recommended that you build out calendars (with at least a start and an end date) at least two years in the future. Additionally, add breaks and days off to the 2026-2027 calendars.
- If you need to update multiple calendars that are similar, you can use the new calendar copy functionality.
- Update District Banks: Review existing district banks and update them as necessary and consider utilizing bank templates.
- SameGoal now supports increased bank substitution that can help you write banks that are even more customized to the student.
- Fields can now be restricted to district banks only in order to enforce the use of district banks.
- Update Form Settings: Review the list of forms in your district and update the form settings. If your district will not be using a given form, it can be deleted.
- Acknowledge of Receipt is a new workflow being rolled out to districts on the PRO edition of SameGoal. Once it’s available at your district, you can configure which form types require acknowledgement.
- In addition to being able to control Copy to New Document support on a per-form basis, administrative users can now also restrict Copy to New Document support on a per-field basis.
- Update District Information: Review the District Information page and ensure everything is up-to-date. Make sure Administrative Options are configured according to district policy.
- If your district uses district-to-district transfer, add contact information for a District-to-District Transfer Coordinator. This information will be visible to users at other districts to help facilitate communication for district-to-district transfers.
- If your district uses SSO for user authentication, set an SSO account creation email preference.
- Configure Student Teams: If your district is on the PRO edition of SameGoal, once Acknowledgement of Receipt is enabled in your environment, you may configure Student Teams manually or with a bulk load.
- Collapse Students: Check if there are preschool or kindergarten students who were created manually who need to be collapsed into student records that have been automatically created via a demographics integration with your SIS. You can run the System Students report (Reports > System > Students) to get a list of all students in your system. Filtering and sorting this list can help to find duplicate students.
- Manage Users and Permissions:
- You can run the Systems Users report (Reports > System > Users) to get a list of all users in your system. Filtering and sorting this list can help you review current user permissions and determine if any user accounts need to be updated.
- If you would like to bulk update users, you can copy and paste in a list of user IDs on the Users page to search for many users at once. You can also filter users by role and update any users who no longer do the same job.
- Review the existing user roles and determine if the current configurations make sense. If not, update the user roles accordingly. If new user roles need to be created, we are currently in the process of rolling out a new feature that allows you to create a new role by copying an existing role.
- Review SameGoal’s blog page for newly added forms/reports. With the addition of new forms/reports, user roles will need to be updated in order for the forms/reports to be accessible to non-admin users. Add permissions for new forms/reports as needed.
- When an existing user role is updated, any users who have that role applied will have their permissions updated automatically, without needing to reassign or change user roles.
- Attend Refresher Training: Register for one of our upcoming Administrative Functionality refresher training sessions on the Events page. If you are unable to make it, you can review our list of Recent Webinars and watch a recording.