For internal transfers, you can randomly assign students to a site in K12 Transfers using the Lottery. The lottery view anonymizes students and allows mass assignment. Once in the lottery view you can shuffle the results as often as you like, filter the results to assign at a particular site and/or grade, and then mass approve.
One challenge with our SIS integration occurred when an absence code was updated to a present code. The absence remained in Attend even though it was removed from the SIS. We recently made an update to address this issue. Even though the absence was removed from the SIS, we wanted to keep the record in Attend. To do this we introduced the notion of archiving an absence record. Now absences that get removed from the SIS can be seen in Attend (with a strikethrough) without affecting the absence records and rates.
We also just introduced built in help guidance and support in Attend. Now you can view help documentation directly in Attend. If you need help performing an activity you can click on the “Get Help” link to see a list of help documentation.
If you can’t find the solution you need, you can “Send a Message” and we’ll receive your support request. All of this can be completed directly in Attend.
We’re rolling out new features for K12 Transfers. Today, we enabled admins with the ability to change the assigned school. The feature is meant as a way to correct errors and so parents will not receive notification when these changes are made. You will need to contact them directly.
We took a big step toward wrapping up development of Attend – our absence intervention application – this week with building out the first components that manage notifications. To say that increasing attendance is a complex problem would be the understatement of the year! You start to get an appreciation for how complex it is when you are building a system designed to help districts increase attendance. I had no idea how important attendance is before working on this project!
I’m extremely happy with the results so far. At the 50,000 foot level it sounds easy: pull absence data from the district SIS, crunch some absence rates, and then notify parents that their kids need to stop missing school. Needless to say, there are a myriad of legal and process subtleties that make things get complex quickly. One problem was just the sheer volume of data. Ordinarily when we build applications we deal with student data that is roughly the size of the student population. No big deal. To deal with the sheer volume of absence data, we were unable to take our usual approaches and we ended up writing extremely sophisticated database routines for importing and performing calculations on the data. It took a lot longer than initially planned but I am extremely happy with the outcome. Here’s a view our districts have that allow them to quickly identify and manage at risk students (identifying data have been anonymized).
From here the district’s Child Welfare and Attendance department can quickly review and schedule interventions.
As you can see in this simple example, a single student has nearly 20 absences. Unfortunately, this is not atypical.
Our next step is enabling notifications. I’m extremely happy with our design on this. Not only do we allow districts to generate paper notifications (traditional mail) but we also support email and SMS notifications. This will go a long way to engaging parents as early as possible. I’ll have more to share soon.
K12 Transfers supports email notifications for parents that allow parents to know the status of their student’s transfer request without having to contact the district office. This makes for a much better experience for parents and reduces support costs for the district. However, one challenge that remains is that parents don’t always enter their email addresses correctly. We can’t fix that but today we’re released a feature that provides a brief audit for email notifications. You can see the addresses emails were sent to, when they were sent, if they were opened, and if links in the email were clicked. Now on every transfer request, you have an audit trail for all the emails that were sent regarding the transfer.
I’d also like to take this opportunity to remind you that there are two features that many of you are not using. The first is “on submission” email templates. This template notifies parents when they submit their transfer requests so that they know their transfer is “in process.” The other is granting sites access to view approved transfers. This allows sites to see approved transfers as and when they are approved so that you don’t have to send them spreadsheets in email.
One of the challenges with managing student transfers is communicating with the sites that are to receive new students. Very often the districts we work with email spreadsheets of the approved students to each site. This takes a lot of time when you have lots of sites and is compounded during busy transfer times. With our inter-district transfer application – K12 Transfers – you can now grant access to sites and they can check for approved transfers to their site when it is convenient.
The user will now be able to see approved transfers for their site. No more spreadsheets to compile and no more spreadsheets to email.
