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Dave2 wrote:You had to enter it all every day? I think the school I went to only logged the tardies and absents.

Of course, different systems do it differently - in our present software, for each class unless I enter a different code for the student, it's assumed that they're present. I can also mark them as tardy or absent, with times for each (we change from tardy to absent after the kiddoh has missed 20 minutes of a 48 minute class). the software before this one required us to mark each kid as present, absent, or tardy excused/ tardy unexcused, and wasn't very user-friendly about it.

n5wd wrote:

Dave2 wrote:You had to enter it all every day? I think the school I went to only logged the tardies and absents.

Of course, different systems do it differently - in our present software, for each class unless I enter a different code for the student, it's assumed that they're present. I can also mark them as tardy or absent, with times for each (we change from tardy to absent after the kiddoh has missed 20 minutes of a 48 minute class). the software before this one required us to mark each kid as present, absent, or tardy excused/ tardy unexcused, and wasn't very user-friendly about it.

I think we used clipboards at my school.

I graduated from a tiny private school, though, so that might account for the difference right there.

This whole problem goes away when parents pay out of pocket for their child's school.

Wow, just wow. I guess I'm out of touch.

I went to a small school in a small town. There were eighty-something students in my graduating class. Maybe 400 in high school.
Roll was taken and logged on paper. If you were on the roll for one class and missing from the roll from another class, the school secretary would catch it and call the teacher to see if a mistake had been made. If not, she would call your parents to see what was up. You'd be busted before the class you skipped was over. (Ask me how I know this ) I graduated in 1987.

mgood wrote:I went to a small school in a small town. There were eighty-something students in my graduating class. Maybe 400 in high school. Roll was taken and logged on paper.

We've got almost 1,000 in our freshman class this year - almost 3,000 total population with over 150 teachers: it's a huge 5-A school. The substitute teachers, who don't have access to the electronic attendance/grade systems unless they're on long-term contracts, are the only ones who do it with paper, here - and the attendance clerks (six of them) have to deal with inputting it into the computer. If that computer ever breaks, we're done for!

mgood wrote:If you were on the roll for one class and missing from the roll from another class, the school secretary would catch it and call the teacher to see if a mistake had been made. If not, she would call your parents to see what was up. You'd be busted before the class you skipped was over. (Ask me how I know this ) I graduated in 1987.

Now, teachers have the ability to see whether you were absent just for their class, or for more than one class during the day. With everyone but first period kids, I can check to see if missing kids were absent the periods before and generate a truancy-query to let the attendance folks check to see if the kiddoh was signed off campus, in one of the administrator's offices, or the nurse's office and if not, they get the call to the office sometimes the same day, for sure the next day. Of course, 99% of the kids show up like they're supposed to unless they're ill or something significant causes them to be absent. And, you get to know the kids who regularly skip classes, so they're easy to catch.