Quick Way to Set Attendance

John Ronan

I have a problem/challenge that I can't believe has not been solved somehow.

Our attendance flow is the following:

• Homeroom is the first class of the day. Homeroom ‘teachers’ enter an ‘ABSENT HR' code at the class level for homeroom.
• Right after homeroom, since right now we don't know why the student is absent, our attendance manager (AM) goes through ALL of the ‘ABSENT HR’ codes and sets each student to ‘TRUANT’ for the whole day.
  This way, as each teacher opens their attendance window, they will see a [non-changeable] ‘TRUANT’ code for the student and won't expect to see the student.

We are a large enough school that the AM often has to set dozens of these codes, so we are trying to find the quickest way to do this. Right now, he:

1. Uses a ‘Day Attendance List’ showing ABSENT HR codes entered today,

2. Clicks a student's name to open the profile

3. Clicks ‘Record Absence’

4. Enters the date and the ‘TRUANT’ code

5. Saves and Closes

6. Hits the BACK button on the browser

7. Waits for the list to reload

8. Repeats for the next student

We thought he could at least keep the list up and, for step 2, do a <control>Click, to bring up the student's record in a separate tab [leaving the list intact in the original tab].

This somehow doesn't work. It brings up the student in the same tab, so once finished with that student, we need to reload the list anyway…

Am I missing something? It seems like it should be easier/quicker to do something like this.

Susan Ott

Can't you just bulk add TRUANT to all the students at once? Academics → Attendance → Student Attendance → Record Attendance → search for students → add checkmark to student → repeat until all students added → Save & Close.

David Gillespie

john ronan‍ : I can at least help with one piece: instead of using the CTRL+Click shortcut, if you go through the longer right click + choose "open in new tab", that actually does work. It doesn't take too long then to open all of the students on their own tabs. The CTRL+Click operation doesn't work inside this app.

Jess Moxsky

I agree with Susan. I would pull that list of ABSENT HR and then bulk-add the attendance record. It may necessitate having two windows or tabs side-by-side, but it will be the quickest option for sure.

John Ronan

I wondered why ctrl+click doesn't work.

Is there a reason for that?

John Ronan

Thanks all. Susan's approach makes the most sense, but there's a major gotcha.

And I must say, I am very frustrated right now, so if I'm wrong about this, I'm open to public shaming, but my experience with this system makes me think I'm not wrong…

As our attendance manager is going through the target list of (50+) ABSENT HR codes to convert them to TRUANT, he has to scroll through the scrolling window of 1,624 students to check the ones he needs to convert.

This would not be too onerous if the target list were sorted by last name, as the scrolling window is. BUT THERE'S NO WAY TO ISOLATE ONLY THE STUDENT LAST NAME!!!!

The column is MISSING in this list! I am forced to:

• engage one of my [tech-savvy] assistants to open the list
• export it to Excel
• Split the <firstName LastName> column to separate <firstName> <last name> columns
• Sort by the new <lastName> column
• Save the spreadsheet
• Email it to the attendance manager

All this because SOMEONE decided it wasn't necessary to provide separate first name and last name columns in a Day attendance list!

WHO makes this decision??? And why can't I choose these (or ANY COLUMNS) in the original ‘object’ for this list???? Education Edge provided this 15+ years ago!!!!

BB, are you listening???

Elizabeth Perron

Hi @john ronan,

It's Elizabeth the K-12 Blackbaud Community Manager, I am watching and was hoping one of your peers answers would have worked for you in this peer-to-peer community.

I have reached out to get advise from Blackbaud Product Managers on which direction to point you (Ideas, Support, Account Manager etc.). As soon as I hear back I will share what is your next best step with Blackbaud staff (outside of Community). In the interim, please feel free to use all three of those avenues to share your needs with our product and account experts.

Elizabeth

John Ronan

By way of update:

Because there is no easy way to bulk add attendance, we have adopted Susan's strategy and currently have our attendance manager “practicing” individually converting codes for the homeroom class into codes for all day.

We generally get anywhere from 20-70 reports that students are absent from homeroom…And really a coherent handling of the various cases can only happen after this conversion.

(thus far, he manages to get it done somewhere between 12 and 15 minutes after homeroom ends. A vast improvement from last week, but no comparison to the handy API program I wrote 10 years ago for EE, which did it in about 5-15 seconds ;-( :- )

Jacqueline Koca

Hi @john ronan !

I'm glad the community was able to help make the process a little bit easier for your attendance manager for now.

I did go ahead and put some work into our backlog for adding the name columns separately. Our lists are always in flux with new columns and, as someone who also has a background with EE and query, I'm always happy to add more columns whenever possible.

I definitely recommend adding an idea to the idea bank if there is a column you need on a list. Most of the time, requested columns are easy to add, so even if there are very few votes on the idea, we still grab those ideas and try to get them implemented quickly!