Name: Troubleshooting Attendance
Uploaded: 2025-06-04T19:31:01.573Z
Duration: 59 min 40 s
Description: Troubleshooting Attendance

Transcript for "Troubleshooting Attendance": Awesome. Alright. Looks like we are live. Welcome everyone to our webinar on troubleshooting attendance issues. So we are gonna be addressing some common attendance issues we see here in support in preparation for back to school. So, go ahead and introduce our presenters today. So start with myself. I am Hallie Kasson. I'll be doing a large portion of the presentation. I'm a senior here in customer support, and I am coming to you from Charleston, South Carolina. Later on, we'll have Todd DeSchuiteneer, one of the product principals in support, coming to you from California, and then Arunaa Atreya, another product principal and support coming to you from North Carolina. So we are all coming, from different locations today, but certainly happy to be here. And, yeah, feel free to use the chat and let us know where you're joining us from today. And I'm just gonna give it another minute just to let some folks join as we just began. And as I'm giving a little time, I'm just gonna say this, and you will hear me say this multiple times. But, this webinar is going to be recorded, and it could be accessed later with that registration link. And, yeah, you could share that recording out afterwards. Or if you need to rewatch, it will be available. And starting off with our agenda, we are gonna start with some housekeeping, and then we're gonna have the live presentation. That's gonna go over, you know, setup, roles, future attendance, scheduling in relation to attendance, and then list and report cards in relation to attendance. And then lastly, attendance with the API. And we'll have some time small portion of time at the end for q and a, where our support teams are gonna answer your questions, and we are gonna honor those presubmitted questions during registration first. But if you use that q and a tab, you can submit questions during the presentations and during the presentation. We do have experts that are behind the scenes ready to answer your attendance related questions, which leads me to housekeeping within the webinar. So I already said this, but I'm just gonna say it again, and you'll hear me say it again because I know, people are joining at different times. This webinar is recorded. It will be available after it's over. Another highlight here is audio is gonna be broadcast to your computer speakers. So, if you're having audio issues, you may need to leave and come back. And then I just wanna point out there's a little cogwheel, where you could adjust settings, and then there's a little expansion icon if you wanna expand the presentation screen. And then I want to call out the three tabs that you have access to. There's gonna be that chat tab, which I see some of you've already chatted from, all your locations. Glad to have everyone here today. That second tab and excuse the fact that it says resources on the slide. It's got renamed. It's called the docs tab. And then that third tab is that q and a tab I mentioned. So, again, if you wanna use that q and a tab at any point, you can pop a question in there. We have experts behind the scenes, right, that could help answer your questions. Or if something sparked during the presentation, feel free to use that q and a tab, to get those questions answered. And, again, we're, gonna start at the you know, when we do get to the live q and a portion, we're gonna start with the preregistration questions and honor those. That docs tab I mentioned, that's gonna have a couple resources, related to back to school. And then we are gonna have a survey at the end of the webinar. And since, we're doing these webinars for you, we would love to hear, how you thought about the webinar, what you'd like to see in the future webinar as it's gonna help us craft future content. Alright. Just a quick, statement here. So this presentation does contain forward looking statements that involve inherent risk, uncertainties, and assumptions. It outlines Blackbaud's current plans, general product direction as of date of this presentation was created. Functionality described in this presentation that is not currently available is subject to change at any time without notice at Blackbaud's sole discretion. Please make any purchase decisions based on features and functionality that are currently available. Yes. I read that slide very quickly. I will not read all of the presentation this way, but moving along so we can get to, the good stuff. Alright. So we are gonna start with an overview of just some common issues related to attendance. We're gonna go over settings that you're gonna see when you set up attendance, some buttonology, call out what it means if you choose a certain setting. We wanna take the, a little bit of proactive approach with these settings, meaning going over what it means. That way, you have a good idea of how that functionality is gonna work, to help you best decide to set up your attendance going forward, what's gonna work best for you. So let's get started. Alright. So starting off, in order to access attendance, you do need to be an attendance manager. As an attendance manager, you're gonna navigate to academics, attendance, and then you're gonna see settings. So that's where we're beginning today. We're gonna go right into attendance reasons as the first one listed there under settings. So you're gonna see various reasons for attendance, their category status, school level, faculty access, type, and whether they're excuse or an excuse. The things I really wanna call out here, are, first and foremost, that attendance class option is hard coded, so you can change the name, but you can't change the settings attached to it. All the reasons are gonna be listed here, but editing into any specific reason's gonna pull up all the reasons under that attendance category. That way you get that full view. Call out about if you do make it the virtual attendance type. It's separate from the present type, but it does work similarly. So when you select virtual, it's gonna automatically give it the, attendance reason, set 10 a, using calculations automatically to be set to no, and those settings can't be modified. So I just wanna call that out. Faculty access. So anytime you had a reason, you'll be able to, like, set faculty access. That's just gonna determine if faculty members can choose that reason or not. And then using calculations. There's a couple of callouts on this one. So this option allows for the attendance code or reason to calculate in the day attendance list per day equivalent. So this is gonna be used to calculate the portion of the day the student was absent. And just a few small notes about using calculation. So I already mentioned you can't change it for the attendant class type because that's hard coded. Attendance that does have the settings set to yes or no will, still be included on report card for number of occurrences. For some units, it's only gonna look at the ones that are set to yes. And then, we do maybe recommend creating a separate attendance category if you want certain attendance reasons counting towards number of occurrences as soon as it was absent on the report card. That way, you pick the attendance categories that are gonna pull. And we'll get to the a little bit more on that, later on, but just wanted to call it out while we're here. Alright. And if using calculations is set to no, it will not be included in the day attendance list for the day equivalent. So just keep that in mind when you're setting that. Alright. I think that's a good overview on that. So we're just gonna move on really quickly to display settings. Basically, this is where you're gonna get that display access from, for parents, students, and faculty. So just ensure you have that set if you want them to see, and be able to track the attendance. And this can be configured per school level. Not much more on that, so we'll just move right on along to notifications. These there's another area under settings. Just wanted to highlight this. So this is a notification that can go out to the, you know, teacher, advisor, activity leader. It's gonna go out ten minutes after the class starts if it doesn't detect attendance was taken. And, at this time, that ten minute time in which the notification is sent cannot be changed. Alright. So we'll talk a little bit more on the next, next few slides on the record method. So this is a big one. Right? So to set this, you're gonna go to academics, attendance, select record method under settings. Once you have, you know, set those attendance categories up, got your reasons, you're gonna wanna determine, you know, how you record attendance. Right? So is it gonna be recorded at multiple points during the day, so per period, or is it gonna be recorded at just one point during the day daily? Go ahead and call out if you choose daily. It's still possible to take attendance, in other sections. Right? It just isn't gonna count towards your attendance of record, which is what's gonna display on, like, the report cards, for example. But this may be helpful if you still need to track attendance throughout the day, but maybe it's just not your attendance of record. Right? So if you're using daily. So the chosen record is gonna impact either the class attendance list or day list. We'll get into that, a little later. And then, again, it's gonna affect the way the day equivalent works. Once you're on this record method page, you're gonna be able to select the school year you wanna choose, and then you should see multiple school levels to go ahead and set that for. Find that right school level, edit into it with that pencil icon, and then you're gonna see some more options, which we're gonna talk about. Alright. We're gonna dive into per period record method. So this calculates, and I've said this, and you'll hear me say it again. It calculates the, day equivalent based on the number of classes or the relative length of classes in the day. Right? So we're gonna go over those options for calculating the day equivalent on the next slide, but I wanted to mention this other setting here, which is the allow teachers, to edit attendance x hours after class begins. Right? So this is gonna result in that take attendance button change into an edit button after they take attendance, and they will be able to edit attendance. I think that's the default no. I know that the default is eight hours, but you can change that right here in that setting, and then whatever value you enter is the amount of time. Under that take attendance setting, they're gonna have two options for any student, and that just means a teacher is gonna be able to modify any attendance reason, resubmit attendance with that correction, or only students with faculty approved reasons, and that means the teacher can modify it based on the reasons that are set with faculty access as yet as we talked about back on the attendance reasons page. Alright. Let's dive a little bit into the settings. Right? Looking at the per period option for recording attendance, there's gonna be two options you can select that I mentioned. So first, number of classes in the student's day. That's gonna divide the number of classes a student misses by the total number of classes on the student's schedule to calculate that day equivalent. That's gonna be looking at the time that they you know, that the class is scheduled for. So if a class is sixty minutes and the student was there for, like, ten of the sixty minutes, it's still only gonna look at the sixty minutes it was scheduled for, right, at the missed time. Relative length in the classes of classes in the day. The system is gonna divide the total number of minutes the student, misses by the total number of minutes the student was scheduled to attend, class that day to calculate the equivalent. Sorry. That is where I was giving the example about the minutes. I confused those two. So what I meant is if you are using relative length of cost in the day and they were there for fifty, or ten of the sixty minutes, it's still gonna look at the sixty minutes. Whereas the number of classes just looks at the classes. Right? Alright. It's gonna look at only absence code, so I just wanted to call that out as well. This is gonna give us a segue into the relation here that I keep mentioning. The day equivalent. What is it? How is it used? I've already talked about it a lot, but I just kinda wanted to put that together on a on a little slide here, and let's, go over some of these points. What is it? It's gonna be that calculated number that's gonna give an attendance manager some sort of understanding of how much of the day that was missed. It's gonna be used on that day list, and it is different from days present. Sometimes I hear those terms interchangeably. It is, different. It's most helpful when looking at per period record method since that's where your day equivalent may not be a whole value. Whereas with daily attend attendance, it's just looking at the attendance of record in whichever offer or meeting time you set, and that will give you a valuable one. Right? It uses the attendance reasons. We talked about this, but I just wanted to say it again. It uses the those reasons that are marked as using calculation. So if you see your day equivalent isn't what you expect, go back to your attendance reasons and make sure you're not, calculating something that has set in or using calculation as no, if you're doing, like, a manual calculation to to try to match it. Sometimes we'll see that in support, so I just wanted to call that out. Alright. Now that we talked about per period, we talked about the day equivalent, it kind of makes sense that we talk about daily attendance. So that is the other option, to per period. You can set it as daily. So you can choose a group type, including academics, advisory, or activities. Those are your options. At this time, daily attendance can only be used with one group type. So it's not possible to use both academic groups and activity groups for the attendance of record. So you can select offering if you wish to choose a specific section that records attendance regardless of meeting time. Or on the flip side, you can select meeting time, which is gonna make you choose from the schedule set, and select a meeting time that records attendance regardless of section. So if attendance should be taken every day at 9AM, for instance, this may be a good way, to set it up. And just a note here, by, by selecting an offer and your meeting time, you're indicating when an employee will take the attendance of record for the day. Instructors and other course offerings or meeting times are still able to take attendance as long as it's enabled, which we'll get to, next. But their attendance records will not affect the student's attendance of record calculations with which are those values and counts that you'll see on, like, the report card or transcript, for instance. Just wanted to call that out. They can take it. It's just not necessarily part of the attendance of record. Alrighty. How are days present calculated? So we talked about, the day equivalent. Now we're gonna talk about just how you calculate days present. And, so we got it broken down between daily and per period. Right? So if it's daily, that system's gonna use the days the school's considered in session, and it's gonna subtract a day each time there's a day with at least one absence code. Versus per period, it's gonna look, at the days the school's considered in session and subject day subtract a day each time there's a day with an absence in all class periods. And a few notes I'd like to call out here. It does not look at enrollment start dates. It looks at the term date. So, just wanted to call that one out, and then it's not looking at parties. And you can see this you could pull this value. A question we'll get is how can I pull days present? So you could see it on the report card or transcript. Right? It's an option to pull. Or the other option is you can use the student list, but you must use a time frame filter, for that value to display. And I already mentioned enabling attendance, and I'm not gonna go through all the steps for each of these, but I just wanted to call this out. It's a crucial part of setting up that new school year because you don't have attendance enabled on a class, for instance. Teachers aren't gonna be able to take attendance in that class when the school year comes around. So just wanted to call that out. Another issue you may see is if, this isn't enabled is maybe the class or group is missing from the class attendance section for an attendance manager. Right? So if attendance manager is like, I'm only missing I'm missing a class or two, maybe it's not all. That's a good indicator that it could just be you don't have it enabled on that course record or that group record. Or if it's missing from, like, reports, like, if a group is missing from an attendance report, that could be the same thing. It's not enabled. So I just wanted to call those out. Some those are some some issues we'll see, in support. So I just wanted, to mention them and give you the steps here of how you enable it depending on how you're taking attendance. I, through an analytics even though that's not attendance of record. So just in case you need to enable that as well. I'm not gonna go through the steps. Again, this is recorded. So if you wanna, see the see all the steps through here on the slide for you, and you could watch the recording to to go over enabling them. We're gonna move on to attendance roles and access. So just a, quick call before I move on, and I've already said this a couple times. But in case you're joining late, this webinar is being recorded, and it will be available on demand after the webinar concludes. If you have a question now or after the presentation, there is a q and a tab. It's next to that chat tab. That's the first tab you see. It's next to that docs tab. That's the second tab you'll see. Q and a. We have experts behind the scenes ready for your questions, so go ahead and put it in that q and a tab. Alright. Back to presentation. I may call that out one more time just to make sure those running late, know how to ask the questions and how to access the webinar afterwards. But those of you that have been here the whole time, thank you for, me being a repeat. So let's discuss the attendance roles and the access. So starting with attendance managers, and I have a little kinda snippet for each, they can take attendance in a, you know, a few different locations here. So this is a few listed. They've got academics home tasks. They could go to academics attendance. They can go to academics attendance class attendance. They could go to the students profile and academics. So lots of options for attendance manner managers and taking attendance. Teachers, on the other hand, so they can take attendance from their faculty view under my day, and then they will select schedule and performance or use a seating chart. Students and parents can view attendance summary. So I have that little snippet here. You could see the little picture of right. So for a student, they're just gonna go to their my day and then that progress tab and the attendance summary. Again, if you don't have display attendance on that setting we talked about earlier, this will be an area that's affected. So just wanna call that out. For the parent, it's very similar. They click their child's name, and then they click their child's progress tab. And it's the same little attendance summary, box. And we're gonna go into each of those, access points and just wanna call some some things we see with those. So, I already mentioned attendance manager. They can edit attendance, right, attendance categories, settings, right, record method. They're the person that's gonna have the most access to attendance. They can what I wanted to additionally call out is they could take future attendance, modify today's attendance. They can update past attendance. So attendance was already taken. They could update it. They could clear attendance, which we'll talk about that a little later with scheduling. And just a few notes, and we're gonna get into this in the next slide, but I wanna go ahead and mention it because repetition is key, and I think this is an important one to call out. The first thing is is if an attendance manager isn't seeing, like, a group type or a school level when they go to class attendance, it's very possible that the role filter so the attendance manager role has additional options attached to it when you give an individual the role. There's something called a access filter, a role filter. Right? And this gives them access where you can kinda say, I only want them to have access to upper school and middle school attendance, but not lower school, or I only want them to be able to take attendance for academics, but not advisory. Those are just some examples, but excuse me. Alright. So and another note is ensure that the schedule set and I'll say this a couple times too, because this doesn't just pertain to the attendance manager, but the schedules that access is what they'll need set to see attend like, take attendance because they have to be able to see the classes to take attendance for the classes. So that leads me to some, places to check and why. So I talked about the role filter already. Here's some steps to get to the role filter. And, again, that's per individual user. Right? So it's not just the attendance manager role itself. If I was an attendance manager, you would have to go into my name as a member, click on me, and then you would have that ellipses to see the access filter, and you could set it per user in the attendance manager role. So if they're missing, like, if they're supposed to have upper school and lower school and they're missing one of those options, this is likely a role filter issue. Right? It means that they weren't enabled for all school levels, for example. Or if they're missing a group type, same thing. So just wanna call that out because we'll see that sometimes with, with roles, with why is an attendance manager able to see, like, you know, upper school attendance. So that could be one reason. I mentioned this, but I wanted to give the steps. Scheduled set access. Right? So, this one will be stressed just because, depending on the role, you may be giving access at different times. It may be helpful to give an attendance manager maybe if they're new access earlier to the, schedule set because that just gives them access to see those classes under, class attendance when they go to take attendance. So if they don't see any classes, this is a great starting point. And it needs to be enabled. I talked about this. Their settings were listed earlier. But on the course record itself, if you're missing just a course or two, this could be it's just not enabled for that specific course. Alright. Let's talk about teachers. So we talked about where they could tour they could where they could record attendance. Right, so my day, schedule, and performance. I also mentioned they can create scene charts, right, to take attendance. Just a few more callouts that I wanted to mention. Right? So if a teacher has not taken attendance for a past day, they can go back and to that day. Like, if I didn't take attendance yesterday, it will let me go back and take attendance. But if I took attendance yesterday, I cannot go back and change it as a teacher. So that's the caveat. And the other call out here is they cannot take teacher attendance. So that, ability is just for attendance managers. Let's talk about some common issues we see with teachers and access. So this can relate to other areas too. This is totally valid, you know, for the attendance manager access. If a student maybe doesn't have access, right, some of these things need to be set. But we see this most commonly if a teacher is not able to take attendance under my day schedule and performance. Well, could be that the term dates aren't active. Right? So they won't even be able to see their, like, courses anyways if the term date's not active. So that's one consideration. If you can't see the courses, you can't take attendance for them. So that's kinda the logic there. So you need to have active term dates. It needs to be, turned on. We talked about enabling attendance per course level. It also needs to be turned on in that, the display for, faculty. And then I think this all kinda ties together, so I'm gonna say this in in one go. The courses have to be offered so that they can have meeting times because if they don't have meeting times, you won't be able to take attendance. So they need to be offered. Sections can be created. They need to have meeting times. And then the schedule set dates need to be active. Right? So start date and end date. So the the same steps you, had in the previous slide to go check where the schedule set access is for the attendance manager, this is also the same area where you could check the dates. And, also, you can check and review that the schedule set access dates for the faculty roles are active. They're not active. They also won't be able to see the classes, and then they won't be able to take attendance for the classes they can't see. So and same thing with, while you're in the scheduled set access area, you may wanna check the students and the parents' access there too just as a call out and make sure those dates are set, for when you wish them to have access to c courses. Alright. Students. So one call about students and attendance is that we get reports that we get reports on is that a student maybe is missing. Like, a teacher goes to take attendance, and then you don't see a student there. Maybe they're on the roster. It could be because they have a future enroll date for that class section. So to correct that, you would just wanna go update the enroll date for the section, so that it's current. That's really the big one. I I think I already mentioned that they could see the attendance from the attendance summary. And then later on, if they have access to their report card and you're pulling it there, they'd be able to see it there too. So not a ton on future attendance. I just got a slide's worth, but we're gonna go over some of the highlights that I thought would be helpful. Alright. So only users with attendance manager role can record future attendance. I mentioned this already, but just going over some of these key points. Teachers can't take future attendance. When view viewing future attendance after it's been entered, that, again, is only an attendance manager that could see it. Like, you go and you enter it, and then you wanna go and see it. Who has future attendance? Only attendance managers can see that. And then one last call out, kinda big, is if you enter future attendance, it is very possible it will lock down your schedule for those, those dates that you enter that attendance for. So if if you need to edit your schedule and it's locked, you may want to check if future attendance is entered, especially if the attendance is, like, a week from now or the schedule is a week from now and it's locked. Right? That's a very good indicator that future attendance is the culprit. And the best way to really get a view on that while you could see future attendance in other areas, if you don't know where it's coming and who's locking the schedule, future attendance wise, there is a report called pre excused absences by student, and you could filter on those dates, that it's locked for and just get that get those dates that there's future attendance reported for. So that's kind of the best report if you have a schedule that's locked on a future date and you're not sure who's locking it down. Alright. We are going to go over. That's kinda segues perfectly into attendance and scheduling. Right? Talking about locking down the schedule. So but before I do that, I'm gonna repeat myself again. The webinar is recorded. It's gonna be available on demand. And, again, if you have a question, we have experts behind the scenes. Experts behind the scenes, feel free to introduce yourselves in the in the chat, And they're here to help answer those q and a questions you submit. So if you have any questions, go ahead and submit them in the q and a tab. Alright. Back to the presentation. So we talked about schedules locked. I just wanna kinda talk about what you do if this happens. It may happen. Sometimes, the day of, you've gotta make some last minute edits, but attendance has already been taken. That attendance is tied to, you know, classes. Right? It locks the schedule. So one consideration is that if you need to edit the schedule and attendance has been taken, you were gonna have to, and this is gonna be the attendance manager, you're gonna have to clear it. So clearing attendance, you may have to clear it for any section attendance was taken in. So one of the best places for attendance manager to do this, or the place they should be doing this is under class attendance, which is academics, attendance, under related links, class attendance. It's kind of like a soft save option when you clear attendance. So what that means is that it's gonna send it back to unrecorded. Right? But if a teacher recorded, like, students as absent for the day, that will kinda still be soft saved there. It won't count towards anything until you resave it, but you won't lose all of those absences that were entered if you have to clear it. It basically puts it back in unrecorded. You as an attendance manager, once you're done fixing your schedule, and you've got it unlocked, you fix it, you're ready to add the attendance back. Right, once that's done, you just go back to that class attendance. This time filter on unrecorded because it's gonna move it over to that, that filter option, that status. You click take attendance, and you just gotta click save. Right? So you'll see that any absences that were already entered are still there. And And I just wanna call that out because I think sometimes, you know, you'll hear clear attendance and you think all those values are gone. So that's kind of, something to consider if you do need to edit edit your schedule. And just to kinda tack onto that, it's important to confirm your schedule is rotating as you expect. After you make changes, just don't limit having to clear attendance in the future. And, yeah, things come up, and sometimes it's gonna happen anyway. So I really just wanted to go over what you, what you can do if attendance was taken and your schedule got locked. Alrighty. So lists and report cards. So we're gonna take a look at some of the attendance lists and report cards in relation to attendance. We're gonna start with the most helpful list for attendance or the class and day attendance list. So it just depends on your record method, right, and your setup. But I wanted to go over some highlights. The first one here on the left, the class attendance list, you can access that from academics, attendance, under related links, class attendance list. So this is going to capture attendance entries for each period of the day. It's gonna display the student, their attendance type, excused versus unexcused or absence versus tardy, and the class attendance event was logged in. It will only populate with results if the attendance record method is set to per period. To edit records from this area, there's a little ellipsis. You can actually change attendance reasons. You can add a comment. You can also delete records from the class attendance list. But before you do, a little tip, you do need to delete records. We recommend making a backup, and by that, we mean just pulling the report, of your attendance entries using the absence analysis by student and section report. That way you have something to compare it to if you accidentally delete something you didn't mean to when you're deleting entries in this this section. Alright. So we talked about the class list. I'm gonna talk about the day equivalent real quick. So this is gonna give a condensed look at how the absences compare against a student's daily schedule. So it's going to calculate that day equivalent we've talked about. Day equivalent is gonna display as one. If it's per period, again, it's gonna use that calculation depending on, if you use number of occurrences or summit units, and it's gonna compare that against the student's overall daily schedule to get that value. They're only gonna appear once. Students are only only gonna appear once in the day attendance list. So if a student has two or more absence of entries for a school day, for example, they have unexcused followed by an excuse, then the student's gonna be marked excused for the day. The reason category block comms are all gonna display unique attendance entered for the student's day. So just wanna call that out. You could also pull the last edited, and last edited by, in this list. Athletic absences do not contribute to day equivalent. So just a good count a call out here. And then, I've said this already, but you wanna make sure your attendance reasons are set up to use in calculations if you want them to go towards the day equivalent. Alright. I'm not going to go into all the steps here, but we're gonna be talking about report cards. Again, this is recorded, so if you need the steps, it will be available on demand. Just wanna make sure I get through the last section here, so there's some time for the q and a. So you could pull the attendance summary onto the report card, and you can add days present to the report card. When you do add the, attendance summary widget to the report card, you're gonna have an option to add three different columns. So category, number of units, or sum of units. So we're gonna talk about very first one, number of occurrences. You chose this column to add on the report card. It's gonna display number of times that adjacent attendance reason has been logged across the selected group. That attendance count. Right? You can display parties here. The other column you could pull on is some units, so that's gonna be, you know, the portion of the day the student missed due to an absence reason. So if they missed an entire course one day, then the sum of units would be proportionate to the number of class classes missed. So, for example, if you're using per period and attendance is calculated using number of classes, So if one class out of four is missed, right, they missed point two five. So, only attendance reasons that are set to use in calculations are gonna contribute to sum of units. Parties will not. And lastly, for, I handed over to Todd. I just wanted to show this quick view here. Not the most beautiful report card, this one on the far right, section I've, built, but I just wanted to give an idea of what those counts will look look like. So that first column is just the semi units and the number of occurrences. So you add those columns and the last column is how it will display or an example of how it would display. You could style and make it look prettier than I did. And the last few call outs, is that if you set up the terms, for example, like number of occurrences or some of units, that if you're using the single term, it's gonna accumulate these values as the year goes on because, as you could see, you select which terms to to pull on in these columns. Alright. That is it for my section of the presentation, but Todd is going to talk to you about admin tools at API. Thanks, Hallie. Thanks a bunch. I'm Todd DeSchuiteneer here, product support principal here at Blackbaud. And I just wanna take just a couple of your couple minutes of time to just go through attendance through the API. If you're not sure what a API is, it's application protocol interface. It's basically just a set of URLs that another application can use to put stuff in or get stuff out of your Blackbaud application. So as more and more endpoints become available through SkyAPI, there's more options for different features. One common use that we've been seeing a lot of, schools are integrating a third party to track attendance, which is then sent to your Blackbaud application. And, before doing this, if you haven't done it yet or considering it or maybe you already have it implemented, it might be just a good idea to just make sure all this is set. But some things to consider is what workflow do you want your, parents and staff to follow? For example, will the attendance be completed in the third party app completely, or will the initial information be gathered and then sent over to us and for your teachers to be, to take that attendance within the application. So they can send over excuses and then the the student would or the I'm sorry. The teacher would see, you know, absent when they take attendance. And then the other thing is what is the third party integration capable of? So that's a good question to ask. When you're vetting vendors is just what what can your application do for us in Blackbaud? Along that same vein, you might be asking what current workflows you have. Well, here we go. Right now, there's there's really two options within the, the API. Scenario one is attendant excuses, absence, that kind of things are all collected in that third party application, which are then sent into your Blackbaud application. And once that data is in, the teacher use that take attendance task through their faculty persona to lock the student attendance in. So attendance is, a lot like staging grades in your grade book. The teacher can enter grades in, but those grades don't affect the cumulative and they don't show to students or parents until the teacher commits them. And the take attendance model that the teacher launches is a is just like committing a grade. So those things can be pre entered, but until they're taken attendance, they're not really locked in. Scenario two would be the attendance, excuses, absence, all that stuff is collected again in the third party application, which is sent into Blackbaud for attendance. And then the third party also marks the attendance taking, which will update the student status. So some common issues, that we ran into. So when incorporating a third party application to send your data, it's important to have the conversation with the vendor to find out which workflow they have and what will work for you. One of the common issues that I ran into a few times last year, was the student attendance status, which I just briefly talked about. But the student's attendance status is locked in when the attendance is taken. And some attendance integrations, they only send the excuses over and leave it up to school to complete within Blackbaud. This was confusing some schools as they just expected everything to be taken care of by that third party app, but they weren't actually doing that. So we straighten those out, a few and we actually added a couple endpoints to help with those, that some vendors have, taken advantage of. So the available workflows right now, to give our schools more options and, our development team, they they added some endpoints And we work directly with vendors to solve some of those common issues and solve that confusion. So scenario one is the one that was in use prior. It's after sending the application, sends through the excuses through the endpoint post attendance record create, which just, kinda inserts the excuse in there. And then the teacher adviser would mainly go in and record attendance. If that's the way you want it to work, that can happen. The second and third are basically the same end result. They just work a little bit different and this would be through your third party application, how they, utilize the endpoints. But number two is the sending application can utilize the post attendance by section update endpoint. This endpoint basically works a lot like when a teacher takes attendance. They launch that take attendance model. They enter in the absences. Everybody by default is present. They enter the absences and they click take attendance and that locks everything in. This endpoint basically is that. They just mark the the section that they're recording attendance for. They mark the absences and then send in through the endpoint and it marks it as taken. The third one, the sending application can use this patch attendance section, attendance taken update endpoint, which is a mouthful. I had to practice that one a few times. This allows the sending application to mark all the meetings for a day as taken. So basically, they would use that first post attendance record create, send in all the excuses, and then at the end of the day or at a certain time, they can send that, call to the API to mark all sections as taken, which will then update the student's current status. I have a KB reference down there. And again, I'll go through those on the resources, which is on the very next slide. So, for more attendance workflows, I have this really great knowledge base article, number two zero five eight two eight. We'll post that in the docs. But it's titled why does present not appear for teachers when the excuse type is sent through the API. And it goes through basically what I just went through, the different workflows and the different API endpoints. If you're ever curious about what permissions are needed for those API endpoints or just how they function, I encourage you to go look at the API documentation, the roles needed, how it functions, what it actually does is all defined there. And then also keep an eye out on the change log for new functionality that we're adding. As we constantly hear feedback, our API team is really able to pivot quickly and, if needed, we can create new endpoints to do functionality that's not currently available through the API. Also, I encourage you to go out to the community and talk to other schools to see what they're doing or even vendors are out there as well. Our product manager's in there, and he constantly monitors to that to see what kind of things that schools are needing. And that's it. Can I have Arunaa come on and go through what's coming up next? Thank you for hopping on stage, Arunaa. You're muted. There you go. Thank you, Todd. Thank you, Hallie, for that introduction. So I just talk about, what's coming in the near future. We're all really excited. We will be having, parent added attendance. We are on track for the EAP, which begins, sometime during the summer, and our goal is to have general availability by the end of twenty twenty five. We will have a link in here, where, you can sign up to be a part of our EAP. This, I had we had a few prerecord questions where, someone was asking if a parent will be able to go in and edit an attendance. Note the current design is that the parent will go in and enter current attendance or maybe future attendance. They do not have the ability to edit existing attendance. So I just wanted to bring that out, but that's a little sneak into what's coming soon. So we're all excited for this new feature. So if you are, the link will be posted to join the AP. Awesome. Thank you, Arunaa and Todd. So we're gonna use the rest of the time to go over some of those presubmitted questions during registration. But before that, I just wanna go ahead and launch the survey I talked about in the beginning. Again, it's going to go over how helpful this was. If there's topics you like to see in the future, let us let us know on the survey. Really helpful. So when we're crafting future content, it's what you wanna see. But, yeah, we're gonna go ahead and get started with that live q and a. I'll leave it to Arunaa and Todd. Sure. So the first question we got in is how to avoid having teachers take attendance each class and showing up that the student has seven absences when just actually just one day. So I assume, this means, parent or student view. Currently, we do not have any options to change that, but it is something that we are looking into, improving in the future. Running reports and what is comparable to previously available reports. So none of our existing, reports have been removed, but they just might not show all the pages as they did before because we have had a small redesign in our pages. You might need to go into reports to access the same reports as you did previously. We are also kind of monitoring feedback, to see if, you know, if we need to give, some of these quick links, and it should and whether it should be brought back to where it used to be. So, please do look for these reports. They are there in the, report section. Okay. The next one was communication between SchoolPass and Blackbaud being consistent. If you're unfamiliar with SchoolPass, it is, one of those third party applications that handles attendance. Just to speak on that, again, I mentioned that we implemented some newer endpoints. I do recall a few years ago, we were having trouble with the time changes. That's all been ironed out. But SchoolPass determines exactly what endpoints their application is using. We provide kind of the menu of endpoints, and they can choose which ones they use. So, you know, that workflow is used and passes into Blackbaud. If there's any issue with the integration, suggests contacting the vendor to discuss that workflow. They do have access to support and can open a ticket with us, and we can check endpoint workflow, all that stuff. So and, like, and occasionally, issues do occur with the API. Again, we address those as fast as possible. We just the nature of the API allows us to fix things very quickly. So if there are issues come up, we do address those pretty quickly so that your attendance doesn't get screwed up for the day. Are you planning to add the option to send students and maybe other recipients an email notification when they're being marked absent from a commitment? We are in great need of this feature. So currently, if the attendance is linked to a contact infractions, notifications can be sent. You know, that is how it is currently working. We are looking into ways that maybe we can make it, you know do let us know. Go to the idea bank and give us your ideas. Next question is, how do I set up everything? So that's a loaded question. We have a lot of help files and tutorials in our documentation. We will, give you a link to, the tutorial for attendance. I would also say, we have, some excellent beginner classes in BBU. So, do see what you can, subscribe to and take. What other add ons and features are available for attendance in Blackbaud? So currently, all our offerings for attendance are available in product. The only thing that's coming soon is parent added attendance, but, there is no, feature that is not available. Okay. This comes back to what I was talking about earlier. We were told parents would have access to edit their child's attendance in Blackbaud. We do not want this, and this would cause us an abundance of issues. So I just wanna reassure you, parents will only be able to add attendance and target codes for the current date in future days. They will not have the ability to edit any existing attendance. If I enter attendance for an entire group such as an entire grade level on a field trip, why does the teacher still need to go in and take attendance for their grade level class that is missing due to all being on a field trip? I think the only reason you would the teacher would want to go in, to their class and take attendance is to mark the attendance taken checkbox at this point. Yeah. That's that goes along with what I was talking about earlier about walking in and committing that value. Like, you you're staging the attendance beforehand, but in order to commit it, you have that take attendance has to be done. Sorry, Arunaa. No. But that's perfect. The next one was my comments and attendance don't stick if a student is marked in a class. Sometimes a student leaves early even though they will present for half the class, and I go in and comment what time they left to keep track of a possible pattern of leaving class. We need this vital information. I think we need to investigate this a little further. I would not be able to answer exactly what's happening here. So, please create a case, for support for this issue, and we should, help invest you know, look into this. The next one is we had issues with our middle school attendance this year. We had to add meetings for each day versus meeting times. We were able to add in elementary. There were days when this middle school attendance didn't work, and it seems extremely tedious. This again, we need to investigate. I need a little more information, which is, you know, specific to this scenario. So, please do create a case for this issue, and we'll take a look into it. Do you have attendance reports for daily and weekly? It depends on what information you are looking for. We have a lot of scan reports which are available in reports, but the new day attendance list and class attendance list should give you all the, attendance related information that you need. But if it is something specific, do take a look at, our existing reports. Is there a way to have the absences number reflect the number of days absent, not the number of classes absent? So, as Hallie had pound pointed out earlier, you would use occurrences instead of the number of units. So if, parent and student view currently, there's not a way to do this. But if you're looking at it from an administrative view, that's what you would do. So from the parent view and the student view, we are looking at ways to improve this feature in the future. Why do I have to keep entering the same information over and over for data to stick in the system? Why does attendance data double on some students? Why does multiple data get deleted when I'm cleaning up student attendance? So this, again, is very specific to, a process in your school, so we would need to look into this a little more. So do go ahead and create a case for support so that we can investigate further. Blackbaud is new to our school for the 2526 school year. I just want to learn as much about attendance as I can, before the year starts. So I would suggest, like I did earlier, go ahead. We have a lot of offerings in BBU, but we also have a host of help files and tutorials in our documentation. We will post a link to our, documentation, which has, all the tutorials that you would need, for not just attendance, but any other part of, the offering. What is the timeline for parent attendance self reporting? As I said before, we are on track, for it to go into EAP this summer, and we'll have a GA general availability by the end of twenty twenty five. How can I pull attendance reports for individual classes? For example, how many absences a student has in their a block math class that rotates day and time. We have a canned report called the absence analysis by student and section. So it kinds of breaks it down, by student and the number of absences the student has had in each class section. So I think that should, give you the information that you need. But like I said, we have a lot of reports that are available. Please do take a look under the report section. How can we notify parents in real time when their student is marked absent or unexcused for class? And like I said earlier, this can be triggered by an infraction, currently. That's the way it, you know, the current functionality is where it triggers a notification through only an infraction. How can group excusals not be overridden when new excuse excusals or attendance is taken by teachers? So if there is a day attendance entered, that can, override it with class attendance or you can enter class attendance also, one doesn't preclude it. So, how to cancel a group excusal in case a trip or activity is canceled without having to go to each student or having to manually reenter for reenter the group. Well, currently, you will need to go into, the class in in, class attendance and make that change manually. There is no way to group, change attendance. Do we have time left? I think, Hallie, we are ready to wrap up. Yeah. I mean, I just wanna encourage everybody to take that survey at the end. Oh, Hallie. Hey. Absolutely. Looks like we're at time. Yeah. So if you haven't taken the survey before leaving, go ahead and do that. And, again, it's gonna have questions like if there's other content you'd like to see in webinar format, go ahead and leave that for us. We'd love to hear, what you'd like to see in the future. And, yeah, just thank you everyone for your time today and for attending the webinar. Again, this is was recorded. Right? So, once this is over, you could use that link and come back and revisit if you need some of those steps or you didn't catch part of it. But, again, thank you everyone. Hope you have a great rest of your Wednesday. Thank you, everyone.