The Dean’s Office has begun to test a new automated attendance system, which will be implemented at the start of the 2012-2013 school year.

According to Dean Bean, the school is currently running a pilot program to work out any problems when they launch the new system at the start of the next school year.

The old system required teachers to write referrals for students with absences, and then call parents as a reminder about those absences. With the new system, teachers will only be required to take accurate attendance, and the emails and phone calls to parents will be done automatically.

“The reason that we’re looking at doing something different is we have all this technology and we’re trying to find an effective way to use that technology that we have,” Bean said. “The old system took a lot of time and was very teacher sensitive, and the teachers were expected to do a lot of work with the old system.”

Math teacher Katherine Scholten was involved in the making of the new system as part of an administrative internship.

“My role was doing a survey of the faculty to see how the current system was working and what improvements could be made to the system, and what could be done to make it more accurate and efficient, so that attendance could be handled in a more accurate manner,” Scholten said.

Math teacher David Rogers agrees that the new attendance system will be an improvement that will allow teachers to have more time to focus on the classroom and the students.

“I think that it probably will make teachers a little bit happier, partly because we don’t have to make these phone calls home that honestly, we don’t have alot to do with,” Rogers said. “A lot of times we end up relaying information [about absences] that the parents could have gotten somewhere else. We’re not really qualified to give them advice on how to clear the absence, just that an absence occurred.”

According to Bean, the new attendance system will still have the same policy for unexcused absences, but it will get the information in faster as well as making the phone calls home automatic.

“If the technology can help us free up teachers time so they can focus on teaching and learning I think that’s a good thing,” Bean said. “I think the other reason that we’re looking at this is that it gives us at the Dean’s office and at the Guidance office an opportunity to intervene [more quickly] with students that may have some issues with attendance.”