How do I configure attendance for students?

If you're looking to create, edit, or deactivate the types of attendance that you see displayed for students throughout your Schoolrunner site ("Absent [A]", "Tardy Unexcused [TU]", etc.), visit the Attendance Types page, which can be found via the Configure page under the "Setup" dropdown.

Here, you can view all the attendance types your school already has, as well as more detailed information on how and where they are displayed throughout your site.

As with all other "types" throughout the site, click the gear icon in order to view the change history, edit, duplicate, or deactivate the record. You can also toggle on to show inactive types. 

To create a new attendance type, click on the "Add Attendance Type" button in the upper right-hand corner. You'll see something like this screen:

Enter the name of the attendance type, and the code that should represent it. Names and codes should be unique to avoid confusion among different types. Here is a full breakdown of each option.

• Name – The full name of the attendance type.
• Code – The abbreviation of the attendance type.
• SIS ID – Only needed if you plan to export attendance into PowerSchool. See note below.
• Active – Determines whether the attendance type can be used. Deactivating a type does not deactivate existing attendance records that use the attendance type.
• In School – Determines whether kids with this attendance type are considered in school/in class or not. This is binary, and there is no "partial" attendance option. Note: For the context of distance/virtual learning, the "In School" setting does not distinguish whether a student is physically in your building or elsewhere; this setting only determines if a student counts as having attended class/school, regardless of their physical location.
• Show in Class Attendance – Determines whether or not teachers can use this attendance type when they log class attendance.
• Default Class Attendance – Determines whether the attendance type should follow the student from class to class throughout the day (default means that in-school codes do not follow kids and out-of-school codes do).
• Red Flag If In School – Determines whether students with this attendance type should be highlighted in red for teachers on the Class Attendance page if teachers attempt to mark them with an in-school attendance type.
• All Schools – Determines if the particular attendance type is available across all your schools (if you have multiple schools).
• Hidden – Determines if the attendance type should be hidden from all users in dropdowns (regardless of permissions). Useful if you want the attendance type used by a scheduled task but not by staff.

If Schoolrunner syncs directly with your PowerSchool, attendance types in Schoolrunner will reflect whatever you've set up in PS. You can click into any type to see a few settings that are Schoolrunner-specific, but otherwise you need to continue managing everything directly in PS.

If you use PowerSchool, and Schoolrunner is NOT plugged directly into your PS (i.e. your data moves through Clever into Schoolrunner), you need to manage attendance types directly in Schoolrunner. You should make sure that attendance types in Schoolrunner match exactly what you have in PS, to ensure that any attendance you export out of Schoolrunner lines up with what you have in PS, particularly "Code" and "SIS ID".