Convert Daily Attendance Codes

The Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) requires schools to report student attendance in three categories: in-person, remote, e-learning. SchoolInsight uses calendar date codes and student calendar assignments to determine a student’s present category on any given day. This allows schools to report attendance to the state properly and to track each student’s calendar history. In some cases, schools implemented customized attendance codes, rather than creating and managing calendar day codes on their calendars. In these cases, student attendance cannot be properly aggregated into the required ISBE attendance categories.

To help schools that implemented custom attendance codes, we implemented a new tool, Convert Daily Attendance Codes, that searches student attendance codes and school academic calendars to mass populate student attendance calendar history.

For example, a school created and used an attendance code PRL - Present Remote Learning. The Convert Daily Attendance Codes tool will allow this school to convert all instances of PRL to P - Present, AND each student that received a PRL will have an Attendance Calendar History entry for a calendar that has XRLD - Remote Day for the days when they received PRL.

After using the Convert Daily Attendance Codes tool, student in-person, remote, and e-learning attendance will be properly reported to the state and schools will be able to view and track changes in student calendar history. Click here to learn more about how the attendance calendar history feature works.

Please note, the tool requires having an academic calendar with XRLD or XELD, for remote or e-learning, calendar days in order to work. If your setup has only one calendar or a few calendars without XRLD/XELD coverage for the entire year, then we suggest that you create a new Academic Calendar where all days are marked XRLD or XELD according to your school policy. Click here to learn more about how to create an academic calendar.

To convert your customized remote and e-learning attendance to student calendar history:

1. Deactivate attendance codes that indicate place of learning 
2. Convert attendance codes

Deactivate attendance codes

The Convert Daily Attendance Codes tool searches for inactive attendance codes to determine which days a student’s calendar will be changed to in-person, remote, or e-learning. Therefore, the first step is to deactivate your customized attendance codes. Your school should have only one full day active present code (P-Present) prior to using the Convert Daily Attendance Codes tool.

To deactivate your customized attendance codes:

1. Go to Admin Main > Attendance > Attendance Codes
2. edit your customized attendance codes
3. Change Active to No
4. Save

Convert daily attendance codes

The Convert Daily Attendance Codes tool looks for dates/student(s) of when the inactive attendance code was given, and will match those dates with an academic calendar that has an XRLD or XELD calendar day code. The results of using the tool are:

• Student attendance codes will be changed from the inactive attendance code to an active attendance code (P-Present)
• Student attendance calendar history will be updated. The proper calendar will be assigned to indicate the dates that the student was in-person, remote learning, and e-learning
• The ISBE Student Attendance file will aggregate student attendance into the proper categories

To use the Convert Daily Attendance Codes tool:

1. Go to Admin Main > Options > Misc > Convert Daily Attendance Codes
2. Select the Academic Year
3. Select your customized Inactive Attendance Code
4. Select the Calendar Code that the inactive attendance code represents
5. Select the Updated Attendance Code that will be used to replace the inactive code that was previously assigned to students
   • • We suggest that you use P - Present
6. Preview
7. Review the Current and Updated columns to see the changes that will be made to the student calendar assignment and attendance codes for each day
   • • Note that if you have not created calendars that have XELD and XRLD days, the status in the right hand column will indicate that there are no calendars with your selected code. Calendars cannot be assigned to students for these days.
8. Click Save

The program will update 500 records per iteration. Repeat the above steps until the program displays the following message:

Example

In the example below, rather than assigning the XRLD days on the school calendar, a school assigned the X-Instructional day code to the calendar and used an R-Remote attendance code on school XRLD days. This school will need to convert their student attendance to the proper P-Present attendance code and assign a calendar that has the XRLD code for the dates that students had the R-Remote attendance code assigned. To do this, the admin has taken the following steps:

1. Created a calendar with all days marked as XRLD
2. Marked the R-Remote attendance code as inactive.
3. Used the Convert Daily Attendance Code tool 

Our sample student had the following settings:

• Original school calendar that had all days set as X-Instructional days
• R-Remote attendance code assigned on all dates from 8/14 through 10/8
• P-Present attendance code assigned After 10/8

Prior to converting the attendance codes, the student history looks like this:

When using the Convert Daily Attendance Code Tool, the admin made the following selections:

The page will display changes for all students. Below is an example of how the changes will appear for our student. Notice that there are columns that show both the current calendar and attendance code that is assigned and the calendar and attendance code updates that will be made:

After using the tool, the calendar history looks like this:

Note the tool has created a single entry in the Student Attendance Calendar History starting on 8/14/2020 for the calendar with all XRLD days. Starting on 10/9/2020 the student started attending the school in-person; therefore, the regular calendar’s start date is set for this date.