ALSDE Attendance Tutorials

Attendance Updates Webinar 10-10-2023

Understanding AL Attendance Updates              8-29-2023

How to Re-Code Student Attendance Once They Bring in a Note 

Taking Single Day Attendance as a Teacher 

with the New AL Attendance Updates

How to Perform a Student Check In 

with the New AL Attendance Updates

How to Perform a Student Check Out

with the New AL Attendance Updates

Calculating Daily Tardy Codes Attendance Update 3-1-2024 

Posting Attendance for a Teacher in the Admin Portal 

with the New AL Attendance Updates

ALSDE Attendance Manual & Guidance

The Alabama Attendance Manual serves as guidance for each local education agency (LEA) to ensure clear expectations for student attendance, attendance reporting, and supporting services/interventions that have a positive impact on attendance. This manual was developed by your colleagues across school districts and communities in Alabama to provide updates on Alabama Code, PowerSchool Student Information System, and resources/procedures in relation to student attendance.  The attendance manual can be accessed from the link below.

2021-2022 Attendance Manual.pdf - Google Drive 

ALSDE_Attendance Procedures.pdf

Level Data Attendance Reports

Unexcused Absence Report by Date

The Unexcused Absence by Date Report allows schools, whether using Meeting or Daily Attendance, to quickly identify the number of days students have been Unexcused Absent for the specified date range. This report can run at either the school or district level and will allow the user to select the specific Date Range, Unexcused Absence Codes and Schools (when at District Level) for which they want to run the report. 

Daily Attendance Details Report

This report will display the daily attendance data (daily attendance code and/or calculated attendance value) for each selected student for each day within the selected date range.  For schools using Daily Attendance, the report will return the actual daily attendance code assigned for each date.  For schools using Meeting attendance, the report will return the “calculated” attendance value (Present, Absent, Partial, etc.) for each date 

Daily Attendance Summary by Code Report

For Schools using Daily Attendance, this report displays a list of all daily attendance codes associated to each student and how many times they have been assigned for the selected date range.  This report can be used to identify the frequency of applied attendance codes for a selected date range and pinpoint students with excessive attendance violations. 

Searching for Perfect Attendance

Perfect Attendance Search.pdf

Attendance Tracking & Notification (ATN)

ATN Setup.pdf

DAT Tag Links

Note:  Below is describing how to take attendance traditionally and only for users that are not using the enhanced AL version of attendance starting school year 2023

Understanding PowerSchool Attendance

This video goes through the entire setup of attendance configuration within PowerSchool.  By understanding how the attendance settings have been set, users can find the best way to use PowerSchool's attendance features.  In Alabama, the state records the Daily Attendance Values (DAV) to report present and absent status' for accountability purposes in the state.  In PowerSchool, the FTE settings your schools make will directly impact how your DAV is calculated.  This video shows how all of that is related and how your front offices will need to concentrate their efforts in attendance record keeping based on the settings your school has chosen.

Attendance Tips - Note this is no longer needed with the new AL attendance version starting with the 2023 School year.  This process can be used if needed in any circumstance however.

One of the missing features of attendance from Inow is that Inow would automatically push 1st period absences to all other periods in the students schedule.  Now while there is no way currently for this to happen automatically in PowerSchool, there is a way for schools to trigger this themselves.  With a quick 1 minute task each day, you can recreate this feature by following the steps in the video below.