Generating School Days
School days are what you will use to track attendance, school days, and non-school days within BigSIS. Doing this in advance is imperative and will help you stay organized throughout the school year.
- Go to Students > Other > Academic Years.
- Select the academic year you want to create school days for (e.g., the newest one/upcoming one).
- Now, click Generate Missing Days in the School Days Status box.
BigSIS will automatically set up all the days between the academic begin and end dates, or the work begin and end dates, whichever is longer. BigSIS will take into account the non-school day work days, school days, weekends, and major holidays.
- IMPORTANT! Complete this step before you pre-generate attendance!
To edit any day within the school year, click on the School Days related tab, select the day you want to edit and click the yellow Edit Day button. BigSIS cannot account for vacation and special non-school days for your school so you will need to edit those days and change the type of day (holiday, vacation, teacher workshop day, etc.) they are after you have set up school days.
Click here for more information on How to Edit School Days.
Click here for more information on School Day Types.
Pre-generate daily attendance for the new academic year (this does not affect course attendance)
When you pre-generate attendance, you are essentially assigning a 'Present' status for each student for every school day (see previous step to learn how to create school days) in the upcoming academic year. In other words, each student will be assumed 'Present' for every school day unless and until a staff member notes otherwise on any given day. This allows staff members to worry only about truancies. If you do not pre-generate attendance, then students will not be assumed to be 'Present' and this will require a staff member to have to log attendance for each class manually every day even if an entire class is actually 'Present' on that day.
- Go to Students > Other > Academic Years.
- Select the academic year you want to pre-generate attendance for (e.g., the newest one/upcoming one).
- Now, look on the right of the page for a box titled Date-Related and locate and click the Pre-generate Attendance button.
Note: If you see a Generate Missing Days button instead of a Pre-generate Attendance button, then that means you have not completed setup of School Days. Make sure you Generate School Days for the upcoming academic year.
Note: You may run the pre-generate attendance tool at any time even if you have already entered some truancies; the pre-generate attendance tool will not override any truancies you have manually entered. In fact, this is a good technique to use if you enroll new students during the school year. Since new students were not enrolled when you first ran the pre-generate attendance tool, new students will not be assumed to be 'Present' for the days they attend until you re-run the pre-generate attendance tool (or until a staff member manually takes attendance for that student on each day they are enrolled in the school during the first term). This is why it is a good idea to re-run this tool every time you enroll a new student, so that they may be assumed present as of the first day they enroll and onward.
(Right-click and "Open image in new tab" to enlarge)
- Important: This does not affect Course Attendance. If your school will be using Course Attendance instead of or in addition to Daily Attendance, then each teacher will need to take Course Attendance manually each day for each course they teach.
If rolling over your Academic Year, continue to Step Four: Setting up your Lead Enrollment Configuration
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