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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 on December 27, 2006 02:55 PM | Permalink