Estudiante Knowledgebase

CharterData - Estudiante Knowledgebase

Set "All by Period" for daily attendance click here for instructions to set all students present in daily attendance.

Subject: Submitting Student Attendance Transactions to SAIS

Although a students attendance is recorded in Estudiante on a per day basis, attendance is only periodically submitted to SAIS as the sum of minutes attended over a period of time defined by a "start date" and an "end date". In Estudiante these time intervals are called "Attendance Blocks" and typically will represent a week of attendance data. Another requirement is that there must be attendance intervals having an end-date falling on the critical funding dates as defined by ADE. These dates are the 40^th , the 100^th and the last day of school. Plan is setup in Estudiante from main menu/Attendance/Plan Attendance Blocks.

There are several rules that apply for attendance submission:

You should understand the basis concept of SAIS transactions. To review click on Transaction Overview
Frequency of Submission: ADE has recommendations. See SAIS document on ADE web site
There must be attendance intervals having an end-date falling on the critical funding dates as defined by ADE. These dates are the 40^th , the 100^th and the last day of school.
There is a requirement that the attendance be blocked by week. Note: this does not mean that you "submit" the attendance for the current week, but rather you "block" the attendance for the current week and then "submit" the block when you are confident that attendance is recorded correctly, but not later than 20 days beyond the end date of the block i.e. you have 20 days to prepare and submit. ADE SAIS documents state the following:
1. An attendance transaction may be submitted in
  increments to cover 1-5 school days, but may not
  cross one week’s boundaries. Weeks are defined in
  SAIS as beginning on Sunday and ending on
  Saturday. This is to say that attendance may be
  reported daily or weekly. (Please see note 1 below.)
The student must be enrolled for the entire attendance block interval. Where this is not the case, Estudiante will automatically adjust the attendance block to an interval where the student is enrolled.
The attendance blocks must cover all school days but there can be no overlap of the time intervals.
Making changes. Only "end-date" and "attendance minutes" can be changed once the attendance transaction has been submitted to SAIS. To change the "start-date" the user must first submit a "Delete Attendance" transaction to SAIS and then re-submit the attendance information with an "Add Attendance" transaction.

In support of these SAIS attendance requirements and rules Estudiante defines several steps to be followed by the user. These steps are accessed through options on the Main Menu - Attendance. Please read the "About this Selection" for some general instructions on what each step does.

Enter the students' daily attendance as you normally do...see the Daily Attendance help by clicking on Help With Daily Attendance within Estudiante. Do not submit the attendance transactions to SAIS until you are confident the attendance is entered correctly. This will normally be the following week.
Plan your Attendance Blocks. This should be done at the beginning of the school year and consists of defining the intervals over which you will be summing the students' attendance prior to submitting to SAIS. Make sure you follow the rules defined by ADE and include blocks ending on the 40^th , 100^th and last school days. The reasons for this planning are:

It is helpful to the user to organize the submissions.
It allows Estudiante to do much of the attendance blocking work for you. With the click of a button you will do the following:

For all students that are enrolled for the entire attendance block, Estudiante will sum all attendance and created the needed transaction that will be submitted to SAIS.
Where the attendance block dates overlap a period of membership (enrollment), Estudiante will automatically adjust either the start date or end date of the AB to line up with a time when the student is actually enrolled. For example this would be used when a new student enrolled in the middle of an attendance block.
If the student is not enrolled during the attendance block period nothing will be done as no attendance should be submitted for this student for this period of time.
If the student both withdraws and enrolls during a single AB, Estudiante will display a message saying the user will need to

Process attendance by the defined blocks. By selecting a Block and clicking on "Run Attendance for this Block", Estudiante will do all of the work in preparing transactions for submission to SAIS.
In the cases where the student enrolls or withdraws during the absence block period Estudiante will automatically adjust the start and end dates to match the enroll and/or withdrawal dates.
Go to the SAIS Support / Step 1 where the attendance transactions will be in the list ready for selection and batching into a file for upload to SAIS (Step 2).

Set "All by Period" for daily attendance
	Working with one of our schools we came up with a new command for entering attendance by course roster. See the button "All by Period". Clicking this button will set all students present for the period of the course. In the following screen dump the Advisor course is taught in period 2 (highlighted in red). After clicking all students will be marked present and the "Total Minutes" will be re-calculated. This should speed-up entering attendance by course.

Reports

To assist you in managing your attendance submissions the following reports are available:

Attendance Plan Block List. This report gives you a printed copy of your plan, which is helpful in checking for overlaps and gaps. You print this report from the Attendance Planning menu option. This report lists all of the Attendance Blocks that you have in your plan. It shows the day of the week e.g. "Fri" and School Day Counts. Note: a validity check is no overlap or gaps in the count.
Attendance Blocks Report. This is not the planned blocks but the actual blocks for the individual student. It contains the same fields as the plan plus fields that have values that pertain to the individual student. An example is the Total Minutes Attended by that student in the Attendance Block.

Planned Attendance Blocks where they fit for the student