Linking Attendance To The Master Schedule

Here's an email sent out by Bob Runcie about IMPACT, how it's linking attendance and master schedules, and apparent gaming of the system that is still going on.  Thanks to an anonymous reader for sending it along -- fascinating stuff.  Keep on sending things!

TO: High School Schedulers
Cc: Robert W. Runcie, Chief Information Officer
    David Gilligan, Chief Officer, Office of High
School Programs
    High School Principals
    High School AIOs
    William Miceli, Director, Student Scheduling
    Ed Klunk, Consultant

FROM: IMPACT
DATE: October 23, 2007
RE:   Status of IMPACT

The IMPACT team knows that schedulers, in particular,
have put in many hours to create meaningful and
appropriate student schedules. In an effort to improve
your use of IMPACT and make your job more efficient,
the IMPACT team would like to share some insights we
have discovered over the last few weeks.
Historically, when the master schedule was built in
Legacy SI and when attendance was taken on paper,
there was no immediate connection between scheduling
and attendance. However, one of the important
connections we have made in IMPACT is that the master
schedule has a HUGE impact on the school's attendance
rate. Below are some instances where scheduling may
affect your school's attendance rate:

Recording Attendance
Bell schedules, meeting patterns, and day types all
affect the recording of attendance. If your school
changes its day type, please notify the IMPACT team so
that the daily attendance code calculation can be
modified to match.

Example: Double-Period Classes
In one circumstance, school A created a meeting
pattern so that teachers with double-period classes
did not have to take attendance during the second
period of the class. School B, with the same meeting
pattern, set up double-period classes so that teachers
did take attendance during the second period of the
class. Unfortunately, in school A, the lack of
attendance during that second period resulted in the
school.s attendance rate dropping to the 20th
percentile.

Example: Homerooms
In order to avoid the 15-minute wait for new student
enrollment, school C created dummy homerooms.
Unfortunately, these dummy homerooms reflected 0%
attendance on that school's September monthly summary,
driving that school's attendance rate into the 20th
percentile.

Adding/Dropping vs. Transferring
When you add/drop classes for a student, the system
calculates that student's attendance based on only six
classes;therefore,IMPACT calculates his attendance as
AUHD (absence unexcused half-day). In these cases,
until the scheduler fixes his schedule, the attendance
coordinator must overwrite that student's attendance
to give him credit for a full day. More instructions
on how to do this are posted at
http://impact.cps.k12.il.us/publications.asp

Being Precise
Because CPS had a paper-based attendance system, there
used to be situations where schools 'loosely' followed
the rules. The main example was the rule that all
students must be scheduled for three hundred minutes
of instruction. Now, IMPACT does not overlook these
rules; the system will correctly calculate the
attendance for these students as AUHD (absence
unexcused half-day). Please know that if you override
this code when you know a student is not in school for
three hundred minutes, you are  falsifying an official
Board document.

The IMPACT team is working with individual schools to
identify and correct these issues. The September
monthly summary will not be declared 'official' until
the Office of Compliance and the IMPACT team are
certain that every school's attendance rate has been
correctly recorded.

If you have any question about these processes, please
contact the IMPACT Help Desk, Monday through Friday,
from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m., at (773) 553-3925, option 2.
You may also e-mail questions to [email protected].

Thank you for your hard work and dedication.

IMPACT

Comments

I understand some of these mistake will happen when test driving a new system. Given these errors, how could the district's attendance be at 95%?

School A with the double-period classes apparently didn't schedule them in back-to-back blocks. I know many teachers are intimidated by the long class, but if you keep them in the room the whole time, there should be no reason to take attendance the second period, right?

[Kugler - Dreaming]

Student is not in class after ten minutes I mark them absent for both periods. Ten minutes is my cut off no matter if single or double periods which I teach. There are no directives or policy guidelines of when to take attendance and submit it. I like the new system no more clowning with students coming into class any time they want and changing your records. They are absent period! Now they have to have a written excuse and have the attendance office document and change the official records for these chronic tardy students. It is a good deal for teachers because it takes attendance out of our responsibility and on the attendance office and the student.

I wish I could have an ID scanner in my room and that would even be better!

California Dreamin'

Or finger print, or retinal, maybe.
You could have had both with the money these idiots have given to IMPACT.

All of Runcie's helpful suggestions revolve around programming THEY did not build into the system and now expect teachers and schools to be doing continuously.

"Mary, are you here?"
(forty minutes later),
"And are you still here?"

Bob, you are stealing part of the second forty minutes - so that you can be the king of Premier Urban School Districts?

Why don't you know what each school's day type is?
Better yet, why couldn't that be updated online?

It just occurred to you NOW how important school programmers are to the system?

All this time we thought it was you, Bob.

If you'd known they were so important, I am sure you would have built them a system that worked.

Regarding FUBAR Letter..
Yet, when you put SI and Verify together
there was a system that worked with accuracy!!!! Had, Runcie and his crew listen to the programmers, and those educators that know what is needed in this system IMPACT would have remained in Canada on the shelf. CPS GET THE TAX PAYERS MONEY BACK!!! WHAT ARE OUR ELECTED OFFICIALS DOING?

You are missing the point about double period classes...it isn't that the kids leave and come back or that the classes aren't back to back. The issue is that if you only take attendance once, IMPACT only gives them credit for 46 minutes of attendance. This led to all these students not getting credit for a full days ateendance, even though they were there. Somehow IMPACT isn't smart enough to realize that if a class meets for two periods, the students get double attendance. We, the humans, must enter the attendance twice.

[yellowdart]

Although I'm not sure that I completely understand all the implications of the IMPACT program on schools, I certainly like the fact that it's holding people accountable for keeping accurate records. I am so tired of dealing with school files where there is no accountability, so schools enter whatever they want (e.g., course codes that don't officially exist anymore, classes with math course codes that are named Hip Hop Dance or Urban Gardening). This seems to be going in the right direction, though it's the decisions that IMPACT makes on the back end that will ultimately determine how useful it is.

7:29 -

you are missing the point about why a large school district would pay a vendor millions of dollars to get a system built that can accomodate the recording of double periods.

They had 4 years to understand and execute this concept (this is not counting the two previous false starts, which also involved countless hours of interviews, surveys and needs assessments, since Runcie seemed so hell bent on hiring vendors that had been unable to deliver a product in any another district that was currently functional either).

Runcie instead had these millions spent to pay himself, exert his influence to hire his wife, and pay vendors to take something off the shelf and put a large markup sticker on it.

Anything left over has been spent on the propaganda machine that continues to bluster and blame users because the product does not work, in spite all the efforts of knowledgable and experienced people to counsel, adviseand caution the architects of this debacle.

If you don't like my tone, too bad. Yours is condescending and your logic simplistic, clearly bent on pushing back the blame for a cheap (and cheaply modified) system on the users, when in reality, they are the footsoldiers who built the formidable database over decades that Runcie has destroyed in a matter of months.

This is an insult to the memory of the great Laurel Spitzbarth.

IMPACT incorrectly makes assumptions about suspended students and "corrects" my attendance. We spent how much money to buy a system to help the state cheat the CPS out of its state aid?
Great idea. Why exactly is aid based on attendance anyway? Any other systems penalized for kids missing ten minutes? Or just the one with a population over Naperville? Who cares what the attendance rate is?
IMPACT doesn't work or help or anything else. Who is getting the kickback and why can't I think up a good scam?
Oh I know cause I'm a teacher.

It is up to the individual school to eneter the class as a double period. Once it is set correctly, you only need to enter attendance once. Blocking the class takes less than five minutes.

[How I learned to love IMPACT]

I used to feel that the implementation of IMPACT was a bad thing because it replaced a more or less fully functional attendance system with one that is semi-functional and is too rigid and slow for use in most schools. But now I realize that it will prevent Hip Hop math classes from being offered and that makes it all worthwhile. Anything to stem the tide of Hip Hop math classes. Anything.