To help prevent duplicate address records from being created and to make addresses easier to find in IC, it is critical that addresses be formatted correctly and consistently.
Address fields criteria:
- “Number” field contains the house or apartment complex number.
- “Prefix” contains any directional abbreviation (N, S, E, W, etc.) that precedes the actual street name.
- “Street” contains the name of the street ONLY.
- “Tag” contains the street type (see the standard USPS abbreviations below under “References”).
- “Direction” following the “Tag” will rarely, if ever, be used. It is common in places like the Pacific Northwest (where an address might read “3000 184th St SW, Lynnwood, WA 98037”) but not in the Sacramento area.
- “Apt” contains the number of the apartment or condominium. If a building letter is required, enter it before the number with no space or hyphen (ex. A101). Do not enter “Unit” or “Bldg”.
- “City” contains the full city name (no abbreviations here like “Sac”).
- “State” contains the standard 2-letter USPS state abbreviation in capital letters.
- “Zip” contains the zip code.
- “County” is not required as all NUSD addresses fall within Sacramento county.
- “District” contains the district boundary the address falls into. For NUSD, the CDS code is 3475283. Typing the code is often faster than scrolling through the drop-down menu. Do not enter NUSD as the district if the address is not in our boundaries. For out-of-district addresses (ITP’s, parents who live out of the NUSD area), leave this field blank or enter the district if you know it.
Additional formatting requirements:
- No punctuation (periods, commas, #, etc.) should be used in any field unless it is a part of the actual street name (such as a hyphenated street name, though uncommon).
- No spaces after the data entered in each field. This causes records to appear out of sequence in the index:
- Addresses should not be listed on a person’s Demographics Comments section. If you want an address to be on file, create a household. This is the only way to ensure that parents living out of the area will receive mail regarding their student.
Boundaries:
While there are thousands of addresses available in IC, there are many Natomas addresses not yet in IC (particularly individual apartments). When you create new address records, boundaries need to be attached to that record. This piece of data is what ensures that students’ enrollments get rolled to the next school year–otherwise, IC doesn’t know where to place them.
To add boundaries to an address record, first open the school locator and enter the address there to identify the boundary schools. Then go to the “Schools” tab on the address record and select each school (elementary, middle or K-8, and high school) in the drop-down menu. Leave the start date blank:
Whenever a family moves and presents proof of a new address, enter in IC as soon as possible. If the address will not be effective until a certain future date, enter that date as the start date for the address. This makes it clear to all staff what the boundaries are or should be for the student.
Searching:
As with everything else in IC, when you do a search less is more. It is recommended that you start an address search with just the number so you can see all the addresses associated with that number, including records that may be misspelled or poorly formatted. If this yields way too many results, then add just the street name OR just an apt number if applicable. Searching all the fields at once (number, prefix, street, apt, city, state, and zip) will not find an address unless it is an exact match to all of those fields so an existing address with slightly different formatting or any typos will be overlooked and another duplicate created.
Non-residential addresses:
Families may use a mailbox (USPS or other mailing service) as a secondary, mailing address but they must still provide a valid residential address for their primary address.
There are four UPS stores within NUSD boundaries along with at least one other mailing service store (see the list of locations below under “References”). If you are presented with one of these addresses as proof of residence, the family will need to provide proof of their actual physical address within NUSD boundaries or they will need to apply for an Inter-district Transfer (ITP) if they do not actually live in boundary.
If/when you need to create a new address to accommodate one of these secondary mailing addresses, do NOT add boundaries to the address. The student will roll based on the boundaries attached to their primary, residential address.
References:
USPS abbreviations for street types: https://pe.usps.com/text/pub28/28apc_002.htm
Here are the most commonly used:
Non-residential mailing services: