We have an English Language College where students’ attendance is taken twice. For example there is a session 8:00 to 10:00 - then a 30 min break - then another session 10:30 to 12:30.
We want to be able to send the students emails when they are absent as we have a strict policy about how many ‘absents’ a student can have in a term. This way it would keep continually inform the student.
I note there is an auto email for absent students…
However, the way Gibbon calculates it (atleast for us), is it would only consider them “absent” for automatic email purposes if they are absent for both sessions of the day, or the last one. So if first session is absent, and second is present, it isn’t included. We need any absent to be accounted for.
If anyone has any thoughts or solutions I would be all ears.
Since Gibbon has been designed initially for K-12 schools, much of the core functionality is based around how these schools work, so there isn’t built-in functionality about emailing students about their own absences. There are some functions for daily and weekly emails to parents about their children’s absences, but these won’t necessarily help in your case.
If you’re looking to track attendance separately for these sessions, I would recommend using the Attendance by Class options for these, as you can log and query the absolute number of absences rather than the overall “school day” absence. When using class attendance, Gibbon can differentiate these two different absences and calculate them.
If you have someone who can code, it may be helpful to look at the /cli/schoolAdmin_parentDailyEmailSummary.php script, as this could possibly be edited to work for students and be set up as a cron job. Another option is developing your own cli script that looks for total absences and flags students, perhaps with a custom field, and then issues emails to them.