Overview

Edsby’s powerful attendance subsystem has gotten even better for school administrators with the addition of a new “Student Actions” feature (introduced in March 2019). This new capability has been designed to streamline high runner attendance management tasks for attendance administrators. It has been carefully designed based on input and observations of attendance administrators at work.

Access

The Edsby administrative attendance interface now has a new “Student Actions” button under the “Incidents” tab, which is the default tab selected in the attendance administration area:

Selecting a Student

When the “Student Actions” button is pressed the Attendance Administrator gets a search box that enables them to quickly find a student at the school by entering a first name or last name (or both) in Edsby’s standard person search format. Note that once a student has been found the student search bar remains in place, so the Attendance Administrator can switch to a different student by simply typing in a different student’s name. There’s no need to close the window and re-open it.

Student Attendance Actions View

Once a student has been located via search, the full “Student Attendance Actions” view is displayed. This view has four key parts to it:

• Student Summary: This area shows the student name, grade, age, and a quick summary of the student’s attendance totals session to date.
• Parent/Guardian Summary: This area lists the parents/guardians available along with their phone numbers
• Attendance Action Buttons: These four buttons provide convenient shortcuts to high runner actions the Attendance Administrator may wish to do. These are explained in detail below.
• Attendance History: This area shows Planned Absences first (in italics) and then existing attendance incidents (lates and absences) for the student in reverse chronological order. Note that these items are “live” meaning the attendance administrator can click on one and review it or even change the status.

Quick Switching Between Students

As mentioned earlier, an Attendance Administrator can switch from student to student without needing to close the “Student Attendance Actions” window. Simply click in the search bar, and type in the name of a new student. When an appropriate match is found simply click on the match and the window will update to the new student. The example shown here has the Attendance Administrator on “Lisa Lee” and is about to switch to the view for “Robert Frankel”.

Student Actions

The core part of the Student Actions feature is (of course) the student actions. Each of these is geared to a specific high runner action:

• Admit Slip: this generates an admit slip that can be printed on special admit slip printers. As a school you may choose whether an Admit Slip should generates a confirmed late or an unconfirmed late (which is treated as an absence if not confirmed).
• Sign Out: This option is used in a case where a student is in school, but leaves during the school day for some kind of non-excused absence. This will generate a planned absence with the default date and start time set to the current day and time, and the default end time set to the end of the day.
• Away Today: This option is used in a case where a student is not coming to school today. This will generate a planned absence with the default date and start time set to the start of the current day, and the default date and end time set to the end of the current day.
• Planned Absence: This option is used in the case where information is available for a future planned absence for a student. This button will bring up the planned absence form in exactly the same way the planned absence form comes up In the “Planned Absences” tab in the attendance window.