CES and MLS forms?

I was told that the Clerks will have to do the Seminary registration through MLS. Is this true? Will there be instructions on how to do this? How and where do you fill out the information?

opee wrote:I was told that the Clerks will have to do the Seminary registration through MLS. Is this true? Will there be instructions on how to do this? How and where do you fill out the information?

In MLS on the main page, there is a panel called Other Resources that actually contains plug-in modules. One of those is called Seminaries and Institutes.

In our stake (which is in Utah), the local school seminaries have requested that we submit information on the MLS forms. We used MLS to print out the Seminary Released Time Forms, and then we used those forms to input the information under Seminary Relased Time.

The seminary sent out instructions, but it's pretty straightforward. There are topics in the Help file that can get you started.

Alan_Brown wrote:In MLS on the main page, there is a panel called Other Resources that actually contains plug-in modules. One of those is called Seminaries and Institutes.

In our stake (which is in Utah), the local school seminaries have requested that we submit information on the MLS forms. We used MLS to print out the Seminary Released Time Forms, and then we used those forms to input the information under Seminary Relased Time.

The seminary sent out instructions, but it's pretty straightforward. There are topics in the Help file that can get you started.

I noticed those were release-time forms. Are those only for Utah area and those that do Seminary during school hours?

I'll check out the help and see if the CES director has any instructions for the clerks.

Thanks.

opee wrote:I noticed those were release-time forms. Are those only for Utah area and those that do Seminary during school hours?.

Although the wording of the forms is oriented towards Released-Time, we were asked to fill them out for all Seminary students. We have a seminary near a private school in our area that is only early morning seminary for students of that private school and a few home-schooled students. So it's really a seminary registration form, but it doubles as a Released-Time permission form which the local high schools require for their students.

Someone else would have to comment on usage of these forms outside Utah.

Alan_Brown wrote:Someone else would have to comment on usage of these forms outside Utah.

The Released-Time forms have little use in areas where Released-Time seminary is not offered. Just from looking at the forms and the report it is easy to see that the form is used to notify the school that the student has parental permission to attend released-time seminary, and it's corresponding report is used to track which schools the forms need to be sent to, especially if the ward/stake covers more than one school district.

The Seminary Daily and Home Study report is for all other situations when it is not necessary to notify the school that a student is enrolled in seminary.

If you don't have released-time seminary in your area, I guess you could still use the Released-Time report to track what schools the students are enrolled in. But since no notification or coordination with the local schools is needed, what would be the point? How would collecting and tracking that information be useful?

Since it's desirable to have Seminary close to where the school is, and the fact that students may have district exceptions or attend private school, and it's easy to see that seminary attendance could be somewhere other then their normal ward building. In that case, this looks handy to track what student is attending which seminary class and to pass along the roll to Seminary

RussellHltn wrote:Since it's desirable to have Seminary close to where the school is, and the fact that students may have district exceptions or attend private school, and it's easy to see that seminary attendance could be somewhere other then their normal ward building. In that case, this looks handy to track what student is attending which seminary class and to pass along the roll to Seminary

Except that the report isn't designed for that purpose, so it doesn't really lend itself to that functionality in actual practice, except in places where interfacing with public/private school systems in necessary, as in the case with released-time seminary. Also, seminary rolls come from CES directly, not from MLS.

For example, our ward covers 1.5 counties and more than 23 school districts. Since seminary is only held at the ward meetinghouse, which school the students are attending is irrelevant since they all have to travel to the church regardless. Also, the report is turned in to the stake to list potential, not actual, seminary enrollment. We have had some members that for travel considerations have attended seminary at different meetinghouse. However, their attendance at that meetinghouse has no effect on the report we turn it to the stake, because the stake is not interested in where they are attending, only whether they can attend.

In order to use the report for the purposes you describe, there would need to be a space on it that indicated that a member is attending seminary at the Moriacumer Ward Meetinghouse instead of the Mahonri Ward Meetinghouse, or doing home-study. The current form does not provide that functionality because it is not currently relevant to the way CES has asked wards to report potential seminary enrollment.

jbh001 wrote:In order to use the report for the purposes you describe, there would need to be a space on it that indicated that a member is attending seminary at the Moriacumer Ward Meetinghouse instead of the Mahonri Ward Meetinghouse, or doing home-study. The current form does not provide that functionality because it is not currenlty relevant to the way CES has asked wards to track seminary attendance.

Actually, the current form does indeed have a space for indicating where the student attends seminary. There are two parts to the Seminary registration process in MLS:

1. The Released Time Form. This prints out one form per potential seminary student, and is used for registration (and may also be used for submission to schools where they actually have a released-time program).
2. Seminary Released Time. This provides information for each student, including

• Have they turned in a registration form?
• The grade in school/seminary
• The School name

Note that the school name comes from a list that the clerk creates in MLS. So it is really the Seminary name, and can be any name that is helpful.

So some of the terminology is indeed oriented towards released-time, but the MLS capabilities could be used for tracking registration at any number of seminary locations, if that is desired. But it's purely optional, depending on how the local seminary requests that such information be tracked.