January 2, 2007
Tardies not showing?
If you experience problems with tardies not showing on the quick lookup screen or report cards it could 1 of 2 most common settings.
First….Check your attendance codes and be sure the tardy code has the tardy attendance code category checked. As long as you are looking at your attendance codes be sure that each one is marked to earn ADA credit and counts towards membership. Many users mistake an absence as not earning ADA credit. It does. The system looks at the presence status and knows to count that absence as a deduction of attendance because the absent counts as absent.
Second I would be sure the courses that have attendance taken in them are marked correctly in the course setup. If you click on school, courses, and an individual course you will see a box at the bottom that states “Exclude on Report Cards/Transcripts. If this is checked the tardies will not show on the report card.
Granted there could be other reasons why tardies do not show up such as an incorrect code but this is a place to start the trouble shooting!
Posted by Melissa Bitz at 02:08 PM
December 27, 2006
FTE’s (Full Time Equivelancy)
I hope everyone had a Merry Christmas and I wish all of you a Happy New Year!!
Now let’s talk FTE’s. FTE stands for full time equivalency and is used in calculating attendance for students in PowerSchool. To view your FTE’s you can click on school under setup and Full-Time Equivalencies. Every student in your school should be assigned a FTE. Sometimes there can be problems with a student’s FTE and this can affect their attendance. It is possible for a school to have more than one FTE but a student can only be assigned to one FTE. For example you may have half day kindergarten. The school could then create an FTE for full time students and a second FTE used for 1/2 day kindergarten. Once you create the FTE you must go to attendance conversions which are under the school setup as well. Here you set the attendance parameters for the FTE’s that you have set up and PowerSchool looks back at this conversion when calculating attendance. For example the attendance conversion for a student on a Full time FTE may define that if that student misses 0 periods they are present for the full day. If they miss 1 period they are present for .5 of the day and if they miss 2 periods they are present for 0 of the day.
I have seen problems at the beginning of the year where students have incorrect FTE’s. A basic user only really knows if there is a problem with the FTE if they do a thorough check of a student’s attendance. Attendance can still be taken even if the student has an incorrect FTE so that is why it is so very important to consistently do attendance checks.
Each year the FTE created at the school level is given an internal ID in the FTE table in the database. When double checking FTE’s I first like to look up the id’s of the FTE’s that I am using this school year. I can do this by clicking on system and DDE. I then would choose the FTE table. Then I would search for the year id = 16 (2006 school year) in the FTE table and view my FTE’s and the internal id assigned. I could then go back to my start page and do one of 2 things.
1. First I could choose all of my students and choose the quick export or list students function to see the student names, grade level and the FTE the student was on. I would either perform a list students or a quick export the following fields.
^(lastfirst)
^(grade_level)
^(fteid)
This would allow me to veiw if they had an FTE and what that FTE was.
2. Or second I could type in FTEID= in the search students box on the home page. This would search for all of the students with a blank FTEID. If a list of students appeared I could then choose the student field value function from the drop down which would allow me to change one field value for multiple students. My field to change would be FTEID and the new field value would be the internal number the database assigned to that FTE ( I would have looked that up in DDE in the FTE table)
If only one student appeared I could set their FTE by clicking on the transfer info link and the entry date for the current school year.
Posted by Melissa Bitz at 02:55 PM
December 15, 2006
Attendance….Is it right? Use the ADA/ADM report to flag calendar issues
Hey everyone. I am so sorry for the delay in getting my attendance session from PSUG posted to my blog. Right after PSUG I drove with my family to Minneapolis and we flew out to San Diego where we spent a week enjoying the sun and 75 degree weather.
The first thing I like to do to ensure that my attendance is working correctly is to run the ADA/ADM by student report. This will give you a break down by student and show their membership and attendance. This report many times will flag calendar issues and FTE issues amongst other settings that could be incorrect. It is very easy to make a mistake in the calendar and this is a great way to find out if your calendar is set up correctly. Remember that in your calendar you must have a day type chosen, the bell schedule chosen, the in-session check box marked, the membership filled in and the in session type chosen if the day is counted as a contact day. If you forget one of these settings it may count all of your students absent for that day. For example in my session I presented; my students all had 46 membership days for Q2 but their attendance was only 45 so it was counting everyone gone for a day. I knew this must be something in my calendar. I ran the ADA/ADM by date report and saw that one of the dates in my Q2 had an ADA of 0. I went back to the calendar and looked at that day and sure enough I forgot to fill in the bell schedule. Once I filled that in the attendance was correct. I would run this report before the end of every term just to be sure that every student’s attendance is working properly.
Posted by Melissa Bitz at 01:03 PM
June 5, 2006
ADA/ADM reports for the year!!!
Well I thought that ADA/ADM issues were appropriate to blog on at this time of year! Many of you are running membership reports and there are a couple of things that I would like to point out.
First, if you are using the built in ADA/ADM reports instead of exporting days absent and days present be sure to leave the radio button marked to run the report for all students. If you want the report to run for a certain grade level, check the appropriate box on this page. Do not go to the home page and select the grade level and run the report for that selected group of students only. This would only run the report for active students! When you click to run the report for all students, it will include any active and inactive students, which is very important when it comes to $$$$$!!!!
Second…If you are getting 0’s in your attendance column in this report, please go to a student and be sure they have an FTE. To do this, click on a student and choose the transfer info screen. Click on the date and be sure an FTE is showing in the drop down. We have had a lot of schools with this issue and most of the time it is becuase the FTE’s are not set. If you check this and they are set and you still have problems contact the helpdesk!
Posted by Melissa Bitz at 02:42 PM
May 5, 2006
BEWARE WHEN CHANGING ATTENDANCE FOR A GROUP OF STUDENTS!!!
When doing a group attendance change, you can usually ignore the codes to scan for box. This is telling the system to look for an existing specific code and replace it with the code you have chosen from the drop down.
So when would you ever need to use the codes to scan for box?
Example: State track is next week and you know the kids are going to be gone. You do a search for all students in track and do a mass attendance change to school function. In the mean time one of your track members is sick and in the hospital so you have marked that student absent for 2 weeks. Now state track time comes and it is postponed so you go into PS search for all the track students and change them to present. Well in this case you would use the scan for codes box so that it doesn’t overwrite the absence for that one track member who is ill in the hospital. If you search for School function codes and replace them with present it will not replace that student’s absence.
Many times schools are making the mistake of using the codes to scan for box when doing group attendance changes and then the attendance doesn’t actually get changed.
Example: You search for all of the students that are in track (currently all of the students are present.) You choose the code to scan for box and highlight the school function box and also change the code to set to be a school function code. Your attenance will not get changed correctly beccause you have just told PowerSchool to change only the students that already have the school function code in place and these students did not already have that code put in for them….they are present and you have told the application to only change the ones that are already marked as a school function!
Posted by Melissa Bitz at 09:57 AM