Attendance Setup

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The following sections cover Attendance setup for Pennsylvania state reporting, including Attendance Views.

Attendance Validation Tables

Administration > General Setup > District > Validation Tables

Attendance Codes Setup

Administration > Attendance Setup > Setup > Attendance Codes

Update any Attendance Codes that you want to have included in the PDE-4062 Report with a State Group.

Attendance View Setup

Administration > Attendance Setup > Setup > Attendance View Setup

For state reporting purposes, you need an Attendance View that converts full-day absence codes to a Value of 1 regardless of the student's Default Membership Value from Calendar setup.
If you report partial-day absences, make sure the Attendance View converts the partial-day absence codes based on the percentage of the normal calendar day that the student is missing.  Base this on the Default Membership Value from the student's Calendar setup.  For example, consider a part-time Vo-tech student assigned to a half-day calendar (Default Membership Value = 0.5). 

• For this student, you already know that a normal calendar day is half as long as one for a student on a full-day calendar.
• In the Attendance View, if you calculate based on periods, you would indicate that if the student misses two out of four periods, then the resulting absence code converts to a Value of 0.5.

If your standard Attendance View already complies with these guidelines, then you can use that view when running the PIMS Download.  If you do not have an Attendance View set up this way, then you will need to set up a state reporting PIMS view to use for the PIMS Download option.

Why is the PIMS Attendance View Necessary?

Remember that you only need a separate PIMS Attendance View if you do not already have a view complying with the rules described above.
The PIMS Student Calendar template reports unadjusted counts of Days Enrolled, Days Present, and Days Unexcused.  This means that for these three fields, a student's Default Membership Value is not used for weighting membership totals.  If a student is on a calendar with 180 membership days and a Default Membership Value of 0.5, that student will be reported with a Days Enrolled total of 180 for PIMS. 

Caution: Days Present plus Days Unexcused must be less than or equal to Days Enrolled. 

This differs from the way membership and absences are determined for the ADA/ADM Statistics report which does factor in Default Membership Value from the calendar. Note that this difference is due to state reporting requirements.  For the Student Calendar template, weighting of the student's daily membership does get reported in the Percentage of Time Enrolled for Calendar field.

However, since there is a difference in how membership and absences calculate in PIMS compared to ADA/ADM, you do need to follow the Attendance View guidelines described above so that you get accurate counts.

Example

To see how your state Attendance View works, consider the following hypothetical student: 

• Student 77777, Murray Mansfield, has calendar A for A.M. Vo-tech.  The calendar has 180 Membership Days and the Default Membership Value is 0.5.
• Your district's DAILY Attendance View converts full-day absences into a Value of 0.5 for students with calendar A.
• You also have a PIMS Attendance View that converts all full-day absences into a Value of 1, regardless of the student's calendar.
• Murray Mansfield has 2 full-day absences. 

Now, look at how the different Attendance Views work when selected for the appropriate processes: 

If you had used the DAILY Attendance View to calculate PIMS Student Calendar values, you would have received the following incorrect result:

180 (count of membership days) – 1 (sum of 2 absences at Value = 0.5) = 179 Days Present 

• Note that if the student in this example had been enrolled in the PAWGT program, the Percentage of Time Enrolled for Calendar would have been based on that program value instead of the calendar's Default Membership Value.