How does your school handle Teacher coverages in K12

Angela Kunz

I would like to know other High Schools handle teacher coverage in K12 for when teachers are out sick or on personal days.  I am thinking about setting up a temporary teacher that I would assign to the teachers classes so that they could submit attendance  and in the days of Covid be able to access the teachers virtual meetings.  I look forward to any ideas.

Susan Ross

Hi - Maybe "Course Content Editor Access" (Classes) might work for you. This would allow Assignments, Topics, etc. to be added by another teacher (you select which options you want the teacher to have access to update and which courses can be assessed.) Our Attendance Managers can update attendance.

Lucien Piekut

We looked at a lot of solutions inside K12 (teacher roles, temp teacher assignments) but in the end due to security/potential user error, and the fact that teachers (incl. temps) display on report cards I ended up doing the following:

• Using K12 SDK licence, schedule+student names are posted to Google sheet via Blackbaud's School API
• Google sheet has interactive dropdowns that let staff choose the class to submit absence for, and class list gets populated
• Staff enter the absence

I'm considering using the API to plug the info back into K12 after but for now staff seem to be OK with this approach and doing it via the Google sheet. Maintenance is annual, most chunks are automated.

Terri Rodriguez

Can you direct me to information on how you use the SDK to post to Google sheets? Trying to find out how to start this type of work.


Thank you!

Lucien Piekut

Happy to help -- so of course goes without saying using the SDK will require a language of choice to interact with it (Python, Javascript) and some willingness to try coding.


But if we break it down simply what we're talking about is creating pathways from the K12 server to other tools (Google Sheets, SQL warehouse).


This is your starting point for learning about K12s API: https://developer.blackbaud.com/skyapi/apis/school

and the developer community is very active, and very helpful: https://community.blackbaud.com/developer


The broad strokes of what I'm doing goes as follows:

1) Run a script to contact K12s API, and authenticate

2) Call one of the many predetermined datasets available (Students, Classes)

2a) In my case, I like using the "Legacy" lists, so I can customize from a K12 Advanced List

3) Take the information from there, and call the Google API (authenticate again)

4) Finally, place the data from K12, into the Google sheet


Mitch's code here was the biggest unlock for me: https://community.blackbaud.com/forums/viewtopic/486/47841?post_id=196706#p196706


Feel free to PM if you get stuck, I believe it's a really big win to get this type of work going at our various organizations.

Lauren Marcus Eisenberg

We sure would like a streamlined way to plug in a substitute!