Entering Student Attendance

In Aspen, there are a number of ways to enter student attendance. Use the method that works best for your circumstances. The following are the most common ways to take attendance:

You can also view or enter information for individual students on the Student tab, or view student attendance trends.

If your school tracks lunch counts with attendance, office staff or teachers can enter lunch counts when they enter daily attendance.

Note: By default, Aspen uses a negative attendance model, meaning that students are presumed present unless marked absent by a teacher or staff member. However, administrators can require all courses in the organization to use a positive attendance model, in which students are considered absent unless marked present. This feature can also be enabled for specific course sections.

Note that if your district or school requires you to take positive attendance, it only changes how you enter attendance for your classes. You still enter and post daily attendance to the office as you normally would.

You cannot take positive attendance in Aspen Mobile at this time. If you attempt to take positive attendance in Aspen Mobile, you will receive a warning message with a link to the traditional desktop version of Aspen. From here, you can proceed to take positive attendance.

Note: When a student's calendar is not in session, the student is grayed out. Also, the daily and class attendance codes appear as "Not in session" in all areas of the School and Staff views where attendance can be entered.

This helps prevent teachers from mistakenly marking students absent who are in their homeroom but on a different calendar from the current day, such as kindergartners or seniors.