Maintaining accurate attendance data is essential in the educational environment. Not
only is attendance vital to student achievement, but also to school and district finances.
As a result, ensuring that attendance is being recorded consistently and calculated
properly is of utmost importance.
When tracking attendance data, schools must first establish a well-defined process for
recording student attendance throughout the day, as well as define how that attendance
data translates into a Daily Attendance value. This is where the difficulty often begins,
because there is no one way to do this.
Rules for how to calculate daily attendance can vary from school to school, district to
district, and state to state. While some states are more deliberate in their requirements,
others leave the choices more to the individual districts and/or schools. This could
mean that attendance is taken once at the beginning of the day and that determines
students’ absence or presence for the entire day, or attendance is taken in each class
and the daily attendance is calculated based on the number/percentage of classes or
minutes the student attends throughout the day. In some instances, students can only
be considered absent or present for the entire day while other students may earn partial
attendance.
Now, it is important to understand what we are referring to when discussing Daily
Attendance as it can mean different things under different circumstances. When
referring to individual students:
Daily Attendance for a specific date identifies the student’s absence or presence for
that date. Depending on how this is defined within the school, this could mean that a
student was fully absent, fully present, partially absent or partially present. Actual
calculation methods will be specific to each school/district.
For example, it is quite common at the elementary level for student attendance to be
recorded by the teacher, once during the day, in a “Home Room” or Attendance Period.
If students arrive late or leave during the day, only that single attendance value would
need to be updated. Based on the attendance policy the attendance code assigned
would determine the student’s absence or presence for that day.
However, when in the Middle School and/or High School environment, determining daily
attendance can be more complicated. In most instances, attendance is taken in each
class a student is enrolled in throughout the day. Then, based on the number of classes
or minutes attended, the daily attendance value would be calculated, and this is where it
can get complicated.
The threshold of being declared absent versus present and for what portion of a day,
has an unlimited number of possibilities. Some schools may base daily attendance on
the number of periods a student attends, others may base it on the number or
percentage of minutes. Some may credit students with attendance for a portion of the
day. Others don’t, as students are calculated to be either fully absent or fully present.
The individual Daily Attendance values are in turn used to calculate each student’s
ADA or Average Daily Attendance. This is the value most often used to determine if
there is an issue related to attendance. Typically, if a student’s ADA value falls below
90% the student is considered “chronically absent”, which will normally require some
type of intervention from the school.
To calculate Average Daily Attendance, one would add up the number of days a
student has been present within a specific date range, divide it by the number of days
school was in session and then multiply by 100. For example, if a student was present
29 days out of 30 days in session, that student would have an ADA value of 96.67%.
Whatever method a school uses to determine Daily Attendance and ultimately
Average Daily Attendance, ensuring that there is a clear understanding of the entire
attendance process is imperative to student success.