Attendance in Alma

Attendance  - if you don't have your bell schedules and classes in Alma, you can't take attendance. 

See the section below to learn about the difference in SCHOOL attendance verses CLASS attendance 

**IMPORTANT  - or your reports will be wrong!! 

This is a step that leaders should have gone through during Step 7 Navigator for attendance, it is often overlooked as far as checking out those School attendance translation settings on the Settings > Attendance > Class attendance tab.

• - Confirm you have set up state reporting mappings in Settings > Attendance > School Attendance

• - Confirm your desired "Class to school translation method" - if you'll be using the attendance taking class's attendance to be the method by which school attendance is populated.

• - Confirm the School attendance translation settings are set to correspond/make sense based on the corresponding Class attendance code (such as what she's saying here!), in Settings > Attendance > Class attendance tab.

We need attendance in Alma - this should be updated daily/weekly/ 

• First -  Please be sure you go to Settings > Attendance, and make sure you have set and saved State reporting mapping. 

• If you need help with putting attendance in Alma - here is a video below 

Question:  Do I do School Attendance or Class Attendance? 

Refer back to Navigator Step 7 "Class to School Attendance Translation" video and steps too, but:

- For state reporting, school attendance needs to be set/taken.  BUT, how you get there can happen in one of two ways..

In order to take school attendance for a student on a given day, that student needs to be rostered into a class that has a bell schedule attached to it that then dictates what days of the week the student is expected in school.  This needs to be true whether that class is set to take attendance or not.

Then, once this is in place, a student's school attendance can be set/taken in two ways:

- Directly by an Admin who can manage school level attendance directly.  (useful if it's just one Operator taking school attendance for all kids every school day).

- OR, the student's bell scheduled class taking attendance, which then auto-populates that student's school attendance for the day..(useful if an Operator has Teachers that can take that class attendance from their class portal, thus helping out the Operator).. this is where the "class to school translation" comes into play; based on the method chosen there, only one class for a given student on a given day has that linkage/ability to impact their school attendance.  OR, if you choose the first option, that's essentially like turning that feature off, where NO classes impact school attendance!  In this scenario, an Admin would always need to set every student's school attendance themselves in some fashion.