Tracking drop-in after-school care in Activities

Brian LeBlanc

Hello! I would really like to figure out a way to utilize Activities and Extracurriculars for after-school care, but I can't figure out a way to get EMS to accommodate what we need so I'm turning to the hive mind to see if you can help.

We have two "levels", if you will, of ASC. The first is easy to manage: these are the kids that are every-day attendees. They're as easy as creating an ASC activity, adding them to the roster, and taking attendance. Very simple and straightforward.

Where I'm running into a brick wall is with the daily drop-in students who are infrequent ASC attendees. These kids do not need to be on the roster every day, because they don't attend ASC every day. But when they do, I would like them to be recorded somewhere as having attended. This would solve two problems: we would have a record in case of emergency of who we need to account for, and parents would be able to look up their child's attendance record for tax purposes. Right now this is all tracked manually in spreadsheets, which it goes without saying is not ideal.

So far, the best advice I've gotten is "use a third-party" which is all well and good, but I'd really rather do this within Blackbaud itself. Is this possible, or am I out of luck?

Brian Gray

@Brian LeBlanc - I think that this is possible, but using the build-in PRESENT notation would be difficult and would present information in an inconvenient way for the parents.

The attendance system does not record that a student was present for a class/activity/etc. "Present" is a conclusion made based on the lack of any other information. A student is considered present for a class meeting if:

1. the meeting wasn't cancelled by a Schedule Manager
2. the meeting wasn't marked as "Did not meet" by the teacher or Attendance Manager
3. the student did not have any other attendance reason recorded

We don't do any sort of after-school care that requires attendance tracking, so I have nothing directly relevant to base this on. It is based on pandemic-era memories that I have failed to repress. Take this suggestion with more than one grain of salt. Your mileage may vary…

During the pandemic, we had to distinguish between students who were physically present in a classroom, those who attended the class via Zoom, and those who were absent. I created an Attendance Reason Category "Remote Learning" and added the attendance Reason "Present - Remote" to the category. Teachers could record that a student attended the class via Zoom but was not physically present (and so was not involved in contact tracing for possible exposure).

In your case, I think that I would create a Reason category for ASC, and add reason "ASC Present" (and maybe "ASC Not Present" too).

Parents could then get a list of dates with the reason "ASC Present" for tax purposes. I would create two sections - one for the "every day" students and one for the "drop-in" students. The ASC teachers/supervisors/wardens would have to be very diligent about selecting the correct reason for every drop-in student every day.

I apologize if any references to pandemics and contact tracing cause sleep disturbances for a few nights…