Creating a New Attendance Reason

Attendance Reasons affect whether or not an attendance status is excused, present, or absent. The eSD system allows a user to create specific Attendance Reasons based on the district’s attendance policy. Attendance reasons are created at the District Level. Several default reasons are created at the time of a new district’s database implementation and the district has the ability to add additional reasons as needed

Required Permissions:

Menu Level: System
Module Level: Attendance > Attendance Reason (Add, Edit, View, Delete, Sort)

Where to Start

Select System.
Select Attendance.
Select Attendance Reasons.
Select New.

Enter the Reason (required) - a maximum of 50 characters.
Enter the Reason’s Code (required).
Indicate whether the Reason is Excused, Daily Present, Alert Health Office, and/or Teacher’s Selection.
- Excused (expandable text) - Reasons flagged as Excused will generate an attendance status of Absence Excused (AE), Tardy Excused (TE) or Dismissed Excused (DE).
- Daily Present (expandable text) - Reasons flagged as Daily Present will mark the student as present for the day regardless of period absences.
- Alert Health Office (expandable text) - Reasons flagged as Alert Health Office will be included in the Communicable Disease Report.
- Teacher’s Selection (expandable text) - Reasons flagged as Teacher’s Selection adds the attendance reason to the list of selectable reasons on the Teacher Attendance Roster.
Under Please Select All Relevant Events, select each type of attendance event for which the attendance reason should be available. This makes the attendance reason appear in the Reason drop-down menu for the flagged Attendance Events.
Under Please Select Schools for Visibility, select the school(s) at which the Reason can be used. All schools are selected by default. If not all schools should be selected, hold down the Command key and select (Mac) or hold down the Control key and select (PC) to select specific schools.
Select Save.

Attendance Reasons flagged as Daily Present should not be flagged for Late Arrival Attendance Events. This creates a conflict in logic.

Attendance Reasons can be restricted by building, to support school-specific codes.

Any attendance code will return on the state extracts along with their modality (In, R, Both).

User-created Attendance Reasons whose Code or Description begin with the letters “OSS” (no spaces) are included in the NYS extracts Attendance Code and Student Daily Attendance.

Next Steps

To learn more about sorting Attendance Reasons for display purposes, visit Attendance Reasons.