We wanted to briefly discuss how the Attendance module works in QuickSchools, and what happens when a teacher does NOT take (or has not taken) attendance on a designated school day. In these cases, the system will grey out the student record for the period, and reports will indicate that it has not yet been taken for that day/period.

Taking attendance for the first time

The calendar adds school days in real-time when it is first taken on any particular day. For instance, you can establish holidays and school days in the Calendar (found under “New Semester Setup”), but the system will not designate a date as a school day until attendance is taken on that day.

From the example screenshot above, if your school has 2 periods per day, and one of your teachers takes attendance for the first period that day. The remaining second period will be marked as “Not Yet Taken” until it is taken for that period. Likewise, if a teacher marks for the second period first, the first period would be marked as “Not Yet Taken” until it is taken for that period.

Taking / Updating Attendance

Once a teacher has taken attendance for any particular day, they are updating the records in QuickSchools. The update changes the status from ‘Not Yet Taken’ to the actual value. If a teacher forgets or misses one of their rosters at the end of the day, student records will continue to display ‘Not Yet Taken’.

Updating Attendance Not Yet Taken

Resolving “Not Yet Taken” is crucial because such days/periods contribute to the statistics. For example, if for a particular date range, a student is Present for 12 periods, Absent for 4 periods and Not Yet Taken for 4 periods, the system will calculate the Percent Present as 12/20 (i.e. 60%) and Percent Absent as 4/12 (i.e. 20%). Notice that when you add the Percent Present and the Percent Absent, it only adds up to 80%. That is because the remaining 20% is Not Yet Taken.

To identify records that are Not Yet Taken, we recommend running the Attendance Not Yet Taken report (accessible under “Summary Reports”):

Once you’ve identified the students affected, you can have the teachers do so for the affected rosters. Alternatively, you can update directly from the student record, found under the ‘Attendance’ tab. Administrators can click on a cell to update:

Future Improvements

We are looking into improving the way we manage Not Yet Taken in this module. Some ideas we are considering for the FUTURE include:

• Make Subject Attendance optional, and report on Daily Attendance ONLY. With this method, if at least one subject teacher marks the student as present, the student will be marked as Present for the day. If subsequent teachers forget to do so, these records will be ignored.
• Provide reminders for teachers who forget to take attendance on previous school days. Right now, administrators have to use reports in order to find those Not Yet Taken.
• Automatically mark Not Yet Taken as Absent after a lapsed time.

If any of these ideas resonate with you, please let us know. Or if you have other ideas, we’d love to hear from you. As always, we thank you for your feedback and support.