Once a school has an accreditation, you can update its status, phase, dates, notes, and other details as they change. Use these steps for status reviews, phase changes, date corrections, or notes your team wants to keep on file.
When to Use This
Use this when you need to update a school’s existing accreditation in the program you’re working in. If the school does not have an accreditation yet, see Add a School to a Program instead.
Prerequisites
- The school must already have an accreditation in the program you’re working in.
- Any signed-in staff member can open the edit form. There are no separate permissions for individual fields, so anyone who can edit an accreditation can change its status, phase, or any other value on it.
Edit an Accreditation
- Open the school’s record (see Find and Open a School), and select Edit Accreditation Info from the page header or the options menu.
- Update the fields you need to change: Status:, Status Reason:, Current Phase:, the advancement choice, any of the six dates, Notes, or custom field values.
- Select Save Changes.
Result
Rhythm saves your changes and returns you to the school’s record.
What You Can Change
- Status and Status Reason. You can move a school between statuses in any order, including directly from inactive to active. Rhythm does not record who made the change or when beyond the record’s own last-modified information.
- Phase and how it advances. Change the Current Phase:, then choose whether the school advances automatically under that phase’s own rules, advances to a specific phase you name, or waits until you change it yourself. If you choose a specific phase, that phase must belong to the same program.
- Dates. All six dates (Term Start Date, Expiration Date, Renewal Date, Reinstatement Date, Termination Date, Lapse Date) are optional, and you can set or clear them at any time. Rhythm does not compare these dates or use them to trigger another change; they are a record of events, not a switch. Term Start Date and Expiration Date mark the boundaries of the accreditation's current term. Renewal Date, Reinstatement Date, Termination Date, and Lapse Date record notable events in its history: a renewal, a reinstatement after a lapse, a termination, or a lapse. Because you maintain these dates manually, Rhythm never fills them in for you. There is no automated process, such as a drop run, that populates Termination Date, Lapse Date, or Reinstatement Date on its own. Renewing or reinstating a school's membership also does not populate the accreditation's Renewal Date or Reinstatement Date. Membership and accreditation are separate records in Rhythm, so an action on one, such as a membership renewal, never automatically updates the other. Update the accreditation's own dates yourself when you want them to reflect what happened on the membership side.
- Notes. The Notes field is a plain, built-in text field for internal notes about the school’s accreditation. It is not a custom field, and it has its own place on the edit form. It does not appear anywhere else on the school’s record, including its 360 page, so reopen the edit form when you need to see it again.
- Custom fields. Any custom fields your Rhythm account has defined for accreditations appear on the same form. There is no separate "Other Info" section on this form; an earlier version had one that showed no information, and it has since been removed.
Warning
Saving an accreditation replaces the whole record with the values currently on the form. No individual field, including status and phase, is protected from an accidental change, so double-check your entries before saving.
Moving an Accreditation to a Different School
The School: field remains editable when you edit an existing accreditation, so you can reassign the record to a different school. If you do, the accreditation keeps its original identifier, which was built from the school it was first created for. After the move, the identifier and the school named on the record no longer match, which can be confusing if you or a colleague later needs to trace the record by its identifier. Moving a record to a different school is not the same as adding that school’s own accreditation, so consider adding a new one instead if you are not sure. The accreditation's identifier cannot be edited after it is created, so you also cannot use it to move an accreditation between programs.
Warning
An accreditation is tied to the program it was created under; it is not a standard editable field the way status or phase are. Reassigning an existing accreditation to a different program is not a supported way to change its path, since the identifier, phase progression, and related visit records are all built around the original program. If a school needs to follow a different program's rules and timelines going forward, create a separate accreditation record under the correct program instead. If that path also needs different rules or phase requirements than any existing program offers, set up a new program for it first. Because the old and new records are not linked, plan to recreate the accreditation's details, and any related visit records you still need, on the new one.
Related Reading
To see your changes alongside the rest of the school’s information, see View a School's Accreditation on Its 360 Page. Custom fields come from your Rhythm account’s custom field setup, and Rhythm keeps every change in its audit history.