Iowa attendance and chronic absenteeism laws require specific actions from schools based on a student's rate of non-exempt absences, and jmc has developed handy tools to help schools identify legally truant students. In the Period Attendance module, simply code your school's existing absence reasons if they meet exemption criteria and update attendance records as part of your daily operations to maintain accurate data. Then, run absence reports as needed to identify students who are at risk or meeting truancy thresholds.
Editing Reasons and Cutoffs for Truancy
The Period Attendance > Edit Reasons and Cutoffs page allows you to define your school's absence reasons, exemption statuses, and attendance periods for calculating student absences in line with your attendance policy. With just a few simple setup steps, your school will be equipped with the necessary tools to identify rates of truancy.
Exempt from Truancy checkbox: the checkbox that defines your school's existing or new absence reasons as meeting the state's truancy exemption criteria
Period Attendance settings for data entry: the periods used by each grade level in your school for reporting attendance
Running a For a Threshold report
The Period Attendance > For a Threshold report quickly identifies students who meet the state-defined criteria of 10% "Chronically Absent", 15% "Requires Engagement Meeting," or 20% "Truant", helping you efficiently communicate chronic absenteeism to all stakeholders. Include all absence reasons to identify students that are on the verge of meeting the state's criteria or exclude absence reasons that have been labeled "exempt from truancy" for a report of students that meet state-defined criteria.
Absence Rate Threshold: students meeting a 0%, 10% (Chronically Absent), 15% (Requires Engagement Meeting) or 20% (Truant) absence rate based on the total number of periods expected for their grade level over the date range specified in the report
Day From & Day To: the date range (typically a grading term) used in your report to identify the total number of absences and total number of periods for calculation.
"View Term Dates" quick link: a quick link to help you easily identify common grading terms that can be used as date ranges in the "Day From" and "Day To" boxes
Absence Reasons: the type of absences ("All Absence Reasons" or "Exempt from Truancy") used to calculate a student's absence rate