Interesting scenario.
If I'm understanding you correctly, maybe this will help. Would take a bit of reconfiguration on your part but Canvas is setup to work this way.
We have 350+ schools, and use a single term for FALL 1819, SPRING 1819 and SUMMER 1819. Principals are given Account Admin access to their sub account, and when they search or filter can access the current Term or select previous terms FAL1718 and only see their schools courses.
How are you importing your courses?
The SIS Import Format Documentation - Canvas LMS REST API Documentation
We generate ours from database queries, but here's a sample of this mornings sis-courses.csv
If your schools or courses are small enough, you could generate these in spreadsheets and export the CSV.
course_id | short_name | long_name | account_id | term_id | status |
123 | Music Apprec - S1 - P07 | Music Apprec - S1 -- P07 - LAST, F | 73900AB1-1 - FAL18 | 123Arts | T1819FAL | active |
456 | Music Apprec - S2 - P07 | Music Apprec - S2 -- P07 - LAST, F | 73900AB2-1 - FAL18 | 123Arts | T1819FAL | active |
789 | Enrich Elective - S1 - P01 | Enrich Elective - S1 -- P01 - LAST, F | 86450001-1 - FAL18 | 987Elect | T1819FAL | active |
987 | Enrich Elective - S2 - P01 | Enrich Elective - S2 -- P01 - LAST, F | 86450002-1 - SPR19 | 987Elect | T1819SPR | active |
654 | Science 6 - S1 - P02 | Science 6 - S1 -- P02 - LAST, F | 36200001-3 - FAL18 | 456Science | T1819FAL | active |
321 | Science 6 - S1 - P02 | Science 6 - S1 -- P02 - LAST, F | 36200001-4 - FAL18 | 456Science | T1819FAL | active |
963 | Science 6 - S1 - P06 | Science 6 - S1 -- P06 - LAST, F | 36200001-8 - FAL18 | 456Science | T1819FAL | active |
The account_id column. We get a little crazy and create sub accounts by subject, which is probably not necessary for smaller schools/districts, but allows department chairs to be an admin of their content, for mentorship or support reasons.
The bold row. Is a teacher who has already triggered the course shell creation for the Spring term.
With that setup, I could see a reason for adjusting the filter to auto select the current term, but that also feels like something that could setup in Canvas, I'd have to look for an answer to that... maybe SHEBENE knows.