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 student attendance record will be greyed out for the period, and reports will show that attendance is “Not yet taken” for that day/period.

Taking attendance for the first time

School days are added to the attendance calendar in real-time, when attendance is taken for the first time on any particular day. So for example, you can set up holidays and school days in the Attendance Calendar (under “New Semester Setup”), but the system will not actually designate a date as a school day until attendance is taken 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 attendance is taken for that period. Likewise, if a teacher took attendance for the second period first, the first period would be marked as “Not Yet Taken” until attendance is taken for that period.

Taking / Updating Attendance

Once a teacher has taken attendance for any particular day, teachers are actually updating the attendance records in QuickSchools, from “Not Yet Taken” to the actual attendance value. If at the end of the day, a teacher forgets or misses one of his/her attendance rosters, the students attendance records will continue to reflect “Not Yet Taken” in the attendance.

Updating Attendance Not Yet Taken

It’s important to resolve attendance that is Not Yet Taken. This is because attendance days/periods that are Not Yet Taken are part of the attendance 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 added up to 80%. That is because the remaining 20% is Not Yet Taken.

To identify attendance 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 either have the teachers take the attendance for the affected rosters, or update the attendance directly from the student record (under the “Attendance” tab). Administrators can click on a cell to update the attendance:

Future Improvements

We are looking into improving the way we manage attendance that is Not Yet Taken. Some ideas we are considering for the FUTURE include:

• Make Subject Attendance optional, and report on Daily Attendance ONLY. With this method, as long as ONE subject teacher marks the student as present, the student is marked as Present for the day. And only Daily attendance is reported. If subsequent teachers forget to take attendance, 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 attendance 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.