Schedule a demo

Delivering Data You Can Trust

3 min read

How to Calculate ADA/ADM - Chronic Absenteeism in PowerSchool

February 3, 2022 at 4:22 PM

Attendance. What can we say? It's no longer as simple as marking students tardy and adding them up. For many schools, tracking attendance with the multitudes of attendance codes and conversions becomes a full-time job.

This happens not only when checking what codes have been entered and making sure they are updated as needed, but also having to review that data to identify where students stand;  who has perfect or near-perfect attendance, or often more importantly who are the students in crisis or close to it? Identifying these students typically means being able to receive a student's attendance average at any given point in the school year.

Whether looking for students with perfect attendance, those that are considered chronically absent, or anywhere in between…our ADA/ADM chronic absentee report is here to help.

 

How to use the report:

To use this report, from the start page, select the students for whom you need to run the report. Once selected, scroll to the Level Data apps selection and click on the RealTime Reports. Once the report dashboard has loaded select the ‘ADA/ADM Chronic Absenteeism’ report.

Using the pre-filter, set the date range for which you need to search. Next, select from the drop-down list for the attendance value you wish to include in the attendance calculations. If you would just like to include full days present, check the box next to number one. If your filter displays decimal values, this means that your school calculated partial days attendance. If you want to include all portions of a day present select the box next to each value. The student selection should represent the student that had previously been selected. Once all options have been made, click ‘run’.

Once the report loads: 

Once it loads, you'll see a box that contains the total count of students included in the report, as well as the overall attendance average for those students for the selected date range. In addition, you'll see the breakdown of the data based on attendance percentage, grade level, gender, and scheduling ethnicity.

To view the individual student records, scroll down the page. The report will include basic demographics for each student including their entry and exit dates for the selected school year, their attendance average, days in attendance, and days enrolled. Using the filters from the left, you can easily filter students based on enrolled school (when running at the district office), enroll status, grade level, gender, scheduling ethnicity, or even entry or exit dates but more importantly, you can also easily filter by attendance percentage.

For example, if you wanted to find students that have an attendance percentage less than 90%, that is, they have an absence rate of 10% or higher, you can use the attendance percentage filter to narrow the list of students with an attendance rate between 0 and 89.9%.

If needed the table can be sorted by clicking on any of the table headers. In addition, you can expand the report to display up to 100 rows at a time.

Exporting your report:

Once you filter to your desired student selection, you can either click on the export button to automatically export the results to a CSV file (no need to know the field, table names, or complicated tags) or if you'd like to work with this group of students directly in PowerSchool (perhaps there's an attendance letter that needs to printed or mailing labels generated), click on the ‘make current student selection’ button.

The best part of this report, since we did the math for you, there's no need for any additional calculations. Getting to your data has never been easier.

Tom Lang
Written by Tom Lang

Tom Lang has spent more than 3 decades in the field of journalism and marketing, while always having a hand in public education. His father was a school teacher, his mom a school secretary, and his wife teaches high school English and Humanities. On his own, Tom worked his way through college as a school bus driver and today remains closely tied to education as a Board member of FIRST (Robotics) in Michigan. He has worked with high school coaches and athletes for nearly 30 years as a freelance sports writer at the Detroit Free Press, and for more than 10 years as a basketball referee. Bottom line -- help kids grow, learn and create productive futures.

Post a Comment