The Student Information System News Tracker: November 2010

Since last semester, Infinite Campus’s scheduling format has been reworked to accommodate the new time frames of Ben Barber/Frontier “sessions.” Having only three classes a day, compared to Legacy’s four, the differences cause difficulties for attendance clerks when entering student absences.

In order to prevent the system from mistaking absences, the clerks must now evaluate a student’s schedule and make sure they don’t overlap a Legacy class absence with a Ben Barber session.

“The new schedule set-up has created more ‘schedule investigating’ for an attendance clerk to look at before they can actually place an absence on a student,” PEIMS Clerk Pamela Patterson said.

Junior Julia White* received a truancy letter telling her she’d been absent for six class periods, when in reality it had only been three—a mistake caused by Infinite Campus’s overlapping. According to White, her family couldn’t have afforded the truancy court case the mistaken letter would have caused.

“My mom called me and said ‘Why did we just get a truancy letter in the mail. Are you skipping class?’” White said. “I’m not that kind of kid. I felt like it diminished her trust in me because she sounded really frightened and I tell my mom everything.”

Attendance clerks work to elucidate this attendance confusion. When they look at the attendance record, the clerks must look at the course attendance record as opposed to the term attendance.

“Because Ben Barber has three sessions versus LHS having four blocks, it makes it difficult for the attendance clerks to go in and place an absence on a student without checking their schedule first and making sure we don’t overlap a LHS class absence into a BB session,” Mrs. Patterson said.

*Name changed upon request.