How do schools handle a student who goes on leave for an indefinite period of time?

@Jennifer Welch - I created an Admin-only custom field like @Vicky Lopuchowycz described. I put it on the Contact Card General Info section.

I created several statuses:

• Fake Student
• Medical Leave
• Alternate Study (for students who are on an exchange program or School Year Abroad)
• Academic Incomplete (for students who should have graduated in May but have not yet completed all requirements. We leave then as a student until the requirements are met, and then we change the status to graduate.)

The field can be displayed in SKY Lists and Advanced Lists. My programs also read the value through the API.

We use Ruvna's Accountability module. They read an Advanced list that contains all students on one of these statuses and pre-mark them as “excluded" from check-in rosters.

@Jennifer Welch - I don't capture that info in the SIS. The registrar and division heads have to track that.

My notations are good for identifying who is currently on leave, but does not keep any history.

You could do the recordkeeping with an official note. You could create a note type for recording leaves, and use advanced lists to extract data as needed.

You could also create a Learning Profile template to hold the relevant information, and mark it as expired when the student returns from the medical leave.

@Jennifer Welch We haven't fully come up with a solution. In the case of a HS student who is studying abroad for a semester, we drop them from their classes, but keep them in their grade-level community group (no attendance is taken). This assures that parent/guardian receives relevant Pushpages, etc.