Configure Attendance Preferences for Your School / District
Schools handle the attendance process in different ways depending on the needs of the school. To make sure that the attendance process in SchoolFront works the way your school wants it to, an administrator user must set up attendance for your school and configure the functionality to meet school requirement:
Applicable System Roles
System users with the following roles can do this:
Step-by-Step Instructions
Configure Attendance Statuses
1. Login as an administrator.
2. Use the left navigation menu to navigate to Feature Administration.
3. Under Lists, click Attendance Statuses. The Attendance Status Management page will open.
4. Click New Attendance Status. A form will open for adding a new attendance status to the system.
5. Fill in the required information:
| Field Name |
Description |
| Status Code |
No matter what status you add to the system, you must map it to a code in SchoolFront. These codes include:
- A = absent
- AE = absent excused
- L+mins = Late + number of minutes late
- OSS = Out of School Suspension / Suspended
- P = Present
The available codes can be applied multiple times. For instance if you want to add "Field Trip" as a status that is relevant to your school, you may map it to "AE." But you may also use "Doctor Appt." and it will also be mapped to "AE."
|
| Status Name |
This is the name of the status. E.g. "Present" or "Infirmary" or "Field Trip" or "Absent." You will be able to add as many statuses as make sense for your school. |
| Status Abbreviation |
The space in the drop-down menu on attendance pages is limited, so abbreviate the status if it is long, but make sure that it will still make sense to those that take attendance. E.g. "Absent" could be abbreviated as "A" and "Field Trip" could be "F-trip." |
| Available to Teachers |
Check box if you want teachers to be able to use this status to take attendance. If you leave the box unchecked, only attendance administrators will be able to use the status.
Some schools give teachers limited options for statuses, like "absent, present, and late," and then it is the responsibility of the attendance admin to follow up with all children who are not present or late beyond a specific amount of minutes and then clarify as to their whereabouts using more statuses. This keeps the teacher from having to take too much time away from the class to investigate truancies or exorbitant lateness.
|
| Enabled |
If you want the status to be useable in the system, check this box. If you want it to disappear without deleting it, uncheck the box. |
6. Click the Insert button.
Edit or Delete Attendance Statuses
Before you proceed, if you are reading this section of help because you want to delete an attendance status, please note that there is a less-permanent means of hiding attendance statuses if you simply want to disable them but use them later. You do so by editing the status rather than deleting it and then un-checking the box next to Enabled.
Instructions for editing are below along with deleting are as follows:
1. Login as an administrator.
2. Use the left navigation menu to navigate to Feature Administration.
3. Under Lists, click Attendance Statuses. The Attendance Status Management page will open.
4. Find the status you wish to delete or edit and click it to see its details.
5. On the Details tab click edit or delete depending on what you want to do.
6. If you are editing, make sure to click the Save button to save your changes.
Change Who Can Use Attendance Statuses
1. Login as an administrator.
2. Use the left navigation menu to navigate to Feature Administration.
3. Under Lists, click Attendance Statuses. The Attendance Status Management page will open.
4. Find the status you wish to delete or edit and click it to see its details.
5. On the Details tab click edit.
6. In the form, check or uncheck the box next to Available to Teachers.
Note: Some schools give teachers limited options for statuses, like "absent, present, and late," and then it is the responsibility of the attendance admin to follow up with all children who are not present or late beyond a specific amount of minutes and then clarify as to their whereabouts using more statuses. This keeps the teacher from having to take too much time away from the class to investigate truancies or exorbitant lateness.
7. In the form, also check or uncheck the box next to Enabled. If you want the status to be useable in the system, check this box. If you want it to disappear without deleting it, uncheck the box.
8. When you are done, click the Save button.
Enable / Disable Attendance Lock After Teacher Submission
Some schools only want teachers to submit attendance one time each period and then have it "lock" so that attendance cannot be updated/re-submitted. Such schools usually have an attendance administrator whose responsibility it is to follow up on absent students and determine their whereabouts as soon as it become apparent that they are not in class or where they are supposed to be.
This is a particularly import process in residential schools where it's critical that staff know where students are at all times. For these schools to run smoothly, it's counterproductive for teachers to be allowed to submit and update attendance repeatedly--the attendance administrator may end up running in circles.
Therefore these schools have a policy where the teacher takes attendance once and attendance locks. Then if the student who was absent, shows up, the teacher can stop the administrator from searching for the student by calling or emailing them to notify them that the student was located--hopefully stopping the poor administrator from cruising the campus in search of the missing child.
To make attendance lock after submission:
1. Login as an administrator.
2. Use the left navigation menu to navigate to Feature Administration.
3. Under Misc, click Attendance Settings. The Attendance Settings page will open.
4. If you wish to have attendance submission lock after a teacher hits the submit button for a course/section, check the checkbox.
5. Click the Save button.