“We realized that the way we were dealing with attendance at the local level was very manual,” says Kirsten Legore, Executive Director of Student Services at Seguin ISD. 

“We were manually looking through the data, the student information system, going into attendance, and then having that system run us reports, and then from those reports we were going through them—each individual report for each individual school—to see which students were not attending school,” she says. 

“And then, that was prompting intervention that we were doing, but nothing was systematically occurring by way of the software,” she explains. 

‘We Were Spinning Our Wheels’ 

“The SIS just tells us the data, but then we had to take that, turn it into what we were looking for, and then complete the interventions,” says Legore. “Everything was being done on spreadsheets that we were then entering, and so on. We knew that what we were doing was spinning our wheels.” 

“With technology having improved to where it was, we knew that we used other products for other purposes, and it goes a lot faster, and it’s a lot easier—so we started looking for an attendance system that could do the same thing for us: where we can look at a school and the software generates automatically what we’re looking for—and tells us, and prompts us, to do the interventions, and then we complete the interventions. And it’s already telling us what to do next—instead of us having to manually do all of that,” she explains. 

‘We Are Done Manually Slogging Through’ 

“Now—and the goal with implementing an attendance software program is—all of our time will not be spent manually slogging through data reports. Instead, the system will do that for us, and we’ll be busy with actual intervention, working with campuses who will be doing a lot of interventions themselves. And then, our district level interventions —and just having more time working with the individual student and the family on getting the student to come to school,” she says. 

Legore observes, “There aren’t a lot of products out there that do this, and it does seem like it’s an important component of how schools work.”