How do class attendance and daily attendance interact?

There are two types of attendances in Schoolrunner: daily attendance and class attendance. The Class Attendance page is where teachers record the presence or absence of students on a period by period basis. 

The Daily Attendance page is where users (generally the front office) determine a single attendance code that represents the presence or absence of a student in school for the entire day.

These two types of attendance can interact with each other if you've set first period class attendance to determine daily attendance (this is done either via your SIS or via Schoolrunner's "Attendance" settings). When a student receives an attendance code in his or her first period class, that code becomes the daily attendance code for that student (in addition to being the class attendance code for first period).

This means that the attendance code set in class period one will follow that student around for the rest of the day, in the form of a daily attendance record. Teachers in other classes will still be able to record class attendance using codes that differ from the daily attendance code but, for the most part, those codes will count only toward class attendance, not the overarching daily attendance code.

The exception is when a student is first marked with an attendance code that indicates s/he is not in school but, later, a teacher, via the Class Attendance page, saves a record that is considered an "in-school" record.

In this case, the Schoolrunner system trusts the teacher to accurately determine whether a student is present in the classroom, so the daily attendance code that indicates the student is out of school will be deactivated. The teacher will also see the following warning, letting them know what's happening:

Once confirmed, daily attendance codes will be updated along with class attendance codes.

To check which of your codes are considered "in-school" and which aren't, visit your Edit Attendance Types page and look at the In School column. Remember, daily attendance will be overwritten by class attendance if a student's code is changed from one that is not considered "in-school" to one that is considered "in-school".

Another situation to be aware of (assuming first period attendance is configured to set daily attendance) is when a student receives a daily attendance code before receiving a first period class attendance code. If Billy is marked by the front office with a daily attendance code indicating Billy is in school (tardy, for example) but Billy's first period teacher, not seeing Billy at his desk, marks him absent, Billy's daily attendance code will not be updated to mark him as absent (he will still be considered missing for class attendance though).

An important aspect of this particular dynamic between daily and class attendance is that for this to be true, the two codes must be recorded by different users. This is because it's still possible that Billy's class attendance can be set by the same staff member that logged his daily attendance, in which case our system will respect that fact and update daily attendance.

In other words, the first time a daily attendance code is set for a student, that is the code that will stick for the rest of the day unless the daily attendance code indicates a student is not in school and a user overwrites it by giving the student in question an "in-school" attendance code, as detailed above.