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WaspTime Case Study

Graduating to an automated attendance system

Manual time-tracking earns an “F”

Located in Hugoton, a rural town in Southwest Kansas, Hugoton Learning Academy is a charter school focused on non-traditional education for grades 7 through 12. The school helps a wide range of students, including those who do not function well in traditional schools and those who would like to work while pursuing their high school diploma.

As a charter school, Hugoton Learning Academy places a high level of importance on accurately tracking the hours its diploma-seeking students are in school. The school’s funding from the state of Kansas depends upon attendance, so Hugoton Learning Academy must provide the total hours and minutes each student attends class. Two specific days each year are designated as state “count days,” when attendance information is submitted to the state for funding purposes.

In addition, if a student’s attendance becomes spotty, the school needs to immediately address the issue with that student and appropriate family members.

In the past, students signed into school each day on a paper attendance log at the front desk, making time and attendance tracking difficult and time-consuming.

“We have non-traditional hours, which makes it more challenging to accurately track our students’ time in class. The students check in when they first arrive, when they go to lunch, when they return from lunch, and when they leave for the day,” said Michael Burrows, academic coordinator for Hugoton Learning Academy. “Handwriting was sometimes hard to read. Tracking student hours this way became laborious for everyone – students and administrators.”

After the hand-written time log was completed, Burrows spent at least 15 to 20 minutes each day keying the data into a spreadsheet and calculating attendance time.

Hugoton Learning Academy chose WaspTime time and attendance software, including a Wasp barcode time clock. Each of the school’s 16 diploma-seeking students was issued a barcode badge, which they use to simply swipe in and out at the time clock each day.

The WaspTime software automatically checks the time clock and collects check-in and check-out times, and then accurately tabulates the hours each student was in class. The time summary can be reviewed by Hugoton Learning Academy administrators on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.

“We absolutely love this system,” Burrows said. “It’s very easy for everyone to use, and the students like this method of tracking time much better. They think it’s cool to swipe in.”

Rather than spending up to two hours per week manually entering and tabulating hours, Burrows can run completed reports in just 15 minutes, leaving more time for higher-value activities.

With WaspTime reports, Burrows and other school officials can easily share attendance data both inside and outside the school. Reporting to the state for the required “count days” is now fool-proof and incredibly accurate.

“I can easily comply with the annual state attendance reporting requirement,” Burrows said. “When ‘count days’ come up, I run the report, submit the information, and I’m done. Life is so much easier now.”

Finally, the school is able to keep each student’s detailed contact information as part of their attendance records. This centralized location for contact information further streamlines the process of monitoring student attendance.

“This makes it so easy to find phone numbers and other information for students and their families,” Burrows said. “When there is an attendance problem, tracking down contact information is just a click away.”

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