Attendance Rules - trigger alert for consecutive absences

Susan Ott

Does anyone know of a way to use the attendance rules to trigger a notification when 3 consecutive absences occur? Our athletic administrator and nurse would like to know when a student has had 3 advisory absences in a row so they can check in on the student. Right now the attendance rule I have set will trigger if there's 3 absences since the beginning of the school year. Is there a way to have it only trigger when it's consecutive absences? Specifically they would like an auto-generated report that they could receive daily of any students meeting this criteria. I have shown them the canned report (Daily Absence Analysis) that they can pull each day by changing the date range but obviously that doesn't auto-generate or auto-send. 

David Stoller

I don't believe that's possible at this point, but it's a good idea.  As I understand it, attendance rules actually fall under conduct and is a running total of the "attendance of record".  You can reset the running total each term or track for the year, but the point seems to be it simply sends up a flag when the total of tardies or absences is so high that disciplinary action is required. 

Susan Ott

Thanks David - it does fall under Conduct and I figured there wasn't a way but, just in case I was missing something, I wanted to ask. The attendance module definitely needs work - hide attendance types that are division specific from the other divisions, ability to "hide" the hard wired No Excuse that our lower and middle schools don't use, ability to show/hide attendance to parents by type and by per class vs. attendance of record, ability to set notification rules like absences for x # of consecutive days, etc. 

Margie Llinas

Yes, we would find the ability to track consecutive absences useful, too. 


David -- I was curious about how you all are resetting attendance at the start of the term. We were told that attendance could only display for the entire year, which is not as useful at the secondary level, where we have 3 trimesters and attendance within each term is important. Is it at least possible to track through the Conduct module?


Best,

Margie

 

David Stoller

What I was referring to was setting up attendance rules (see below) -- that's really about triggering a notification when a certain cumulative total is reached... generally something like too many tardies and you are assigned a detention.  I don't believe the conduct rules are displayed anywhere and you'd need to generate a report or list to see the running totals.

 

Different point calculation rules can be assigned to each school level. Select an option from the Show settings for drop-down to configure infraction rules for a specific school level.

Select Edit rules to select between three time-frame calculations options:

• Each term in the school year - Points will accumulate for each term and reset at the beginning of the following term.

• The entire school year - Points will accumulate throughout the school year and reset at the onset of the following school year.

• Specific date ranges for each school year - Specify a custom range to determine when point accumulation should begin and reset. Once a date range has been entered, a new field will appear automatically; the new date range fields can be filled optionally to further specify additional point accumulation and reset periods. Entered dates cannot occur within the date range of another entered date.