We are a high school of almost 800 students, and we are trying to refine our attendance procedures in the front office. I am looking for someone willing to share their daily procedures with us. We take period attendance and the teachers enter attendance by period through Faculty Access for the web. I would like to know what reports are run daily and how you follow through on any discrepancies. I am basically interested in the attendance clerk's daily routine. Does anyone out there have any help? Thanks

We are implementing FA Web 6 Attendance this quarter and are in need of support from schools that have our version and are or have been using this. We would appreciate any help. Thank you, Jean Phillips Father Lopez Catholic High School Daytona Beach, FL 32114

Elaine, We have <20% of the students you have, but we have just added Class Attendance to our Day Attendance tracking. We have tackled it as two separate issues: teacher compliance and data accuracy. We are using EE7 Because we need to know if students have arrived, we run an "Attendance Not Taken" report within a few minutes after Homeroom; this got emailed to all staff immediately, with two results: those who did not enter attendance (or did not enter it properly) had their attention drawn to the problem, and everyone knew who the "slackers" were. Staff compliance became less of an issue after two weeks of this. After 4 weeks of this, we stopped emailing the list to all and started emailing it just to those who hadn't taken attendance. Likewise, there is an "Attendance Not Taken" report run for all classes from the day before, so that staff can update their attendance records if they had no time to enter Class Attendance. We don't assume that all teachers will be able to have their attendance in at each period. For one thing, if a student is present, but is sent out of class for the Nurse or disciplinary reasons, and is gone for less than 15 minutes, s/he gets a Tardy for that class. 15 minutes or more results in an Absence for that class. We are still refining the process. We track Absences from Class simply because a certain number means the students receives no credit for the course. Some absences from class, however, are due to mandated counseling or speech therapy sessions, and we cannot penalize a student for these, so they are NOT listed as Absences. Even if a parent calls the student in as sick, and the student appears on the Day Attendance list that is emailed to everyone in the morning, the staff still need to mark the student as Absent, because the "ABS" code is totaled up and put on the report card as a sign to parents of how close the student is to losing credit for the course. Which comes around to staff compliance again, because if the report card says a student had 5 sick days, and each class does NOT list at least 5 Absences, then it shows that your teachers have not been on the ball about Attendance, and there's a weapon for arguing the accuracy of your records handed right to a cantankerous (or litigious) parent. Does that help at all? I feel like we are writing a book on Attendance from scratch, now that we are forcing ourselves this year to track Class Attendance electronically.

Tim: Sounds like we're all on the same page as far as attendance goes. We're still on Vs 6 but our teachers don't take attendance through FAWEB because our clerk doesn't trust them... Does Vs 7 have a decent canned report that isn't a million pages? We export our info to Crystal so we have a one page report which they like. I'm really nervous about having to recreate a Crystal attendance report (for Vs 7) once again because it took us about a year to get this one the way we wanted it. Bonnie

We have just begun to use Blackbaud EE this school year. We are a school of 500 students and we have a rotating schedule of seven classes for each of our students but only six meet in any given day. Period 7 rotates through a seven day cycle. We are very much in the learning/struggling stage. I do period attendance and print out an attendance detail report several times a day. It is from that report that I balance my period attendance. One of my frustrations is that I have not figured out how to add a parent phone number to that report so when I see a discrepancy I have a phone number right there to call. I have changed the look of the report for my purposes, student name, period, teacher, and grade read across the report. I would like to have a column of phone numbers as well. I use the report "Attendance Taken Report" to see who has not taken attendance, but because we are all still learning it is not done as a punishment so much as who is still struggling with attendance. I need to incorporate some other reports that I have used in the past in our previous software. We track tarides and after a student has three tardies in any one class they receive a detention. I have not been able to figure out how to print a report showing class tardies. If anyone has that report I would love to hear from you as well. We also track absences and after five absences we notify parents as a reminder that afer ten absences grades are lowered in classes. I need to create five and ten absence reports and then be able to mail home a report with a letter to parents. We are hoping to be able to e-mail out these reports and letters home by next school year. This office also handles all student mail. We deliver out only first and sixth period. These could be messages from home, reminders of meetings, messages from counselors or the Dean of Discipline, etc. We average about 100 pieces of mail a day. For each piece we look up in schedule the class the student is in and then write down the classroom number on the piece of mail that is going out. This is a long arduous procedure and so we have resorted to printed out student schedules and putting them in a binder and then using the binder for addressing student mail. Seems counter-productive to our objective to save paper. Thanks for starting this. I know I will benefit from any expertise out there.

In Reports, Daily Attendance Reports, Contact Tab, we click on mother as relation to include, and the contact type below. We print this after 3rd period it shows who has been absent 1 or all 3 periods with student name, mothers name and contact numbers. This is a great tool in the EE 7. As for tracking 5 or more absences/tardies we used to track this by periods in a query with reg6 last year, but cannot yet do this with EE 7, very fustrating. I print off a summary report but I get 200 pages with any one who has been absent since day 1. Then highlight totals from there. Hopefully BB will get this in a patch very soon. [i]--- Edited at 10/20/2005 11:53:14 AM by Scott Fortnum[/i]

Barbara, I am working in BBD 6, and I have the same need, to be able to send attendance letters to parents when a student is at I believe 4 days, and then after 8 days they get pulled from the class. Have you received any answers on how to track this and have BBD create a letter for you??