Overview
In WDIS, students must meet the enrollment threshold which means they must participate in at least 12 contact hours of instructional activity (10 hours of direct instruction and two hours of testing for placement purposes) per program within a reporting period to be counted as fundable enrollment. If the student does not meet the 10 hours of direct instruction, the actual number of hours of attendance, not the originally scheduled hours, is reported.
Focus will automatically handle this for reporting purposes if the teachers accurately enter hourly attendance. “Reporting period” refers to a reporting survey for state student level reporting requirements.
For this reason, it is recommended that all adult ed teachers take hourly attendance in Focus for tracking purposes. Below we describe how attendance is entered for WDIS teachers.
Take Attendance
Every day that you are required to take attendance you will get an alert on your portal page that says You need to take attendance today: then it will provide a link to take attendance for each class you teach. You can click on this link to get to the Take Attendance page.
Alternatively, you can click on the Take Attendance option in the left menu and select the class at the top right of Focus.
On the right side of this take attendance page, you will see today's date and with fields for each student is marked present by default. You can change students to absent by selecting the radio button under that code. The only code which will allow you to enter hours present is the present code. You will see by default the number hours and minutes that the students are assigned to your class, you can adjust this amount down if the student only attends part of the class, and you may adjust this time up if a student comes in early or stays late to make up missed hours from a previously scheduled day. Even if all of students are present for the entire time you still must click Save.
On the left side of the page you will see previous days attendance. If allowed by your school, you can adjust the prior days attendance as needed. For example, if you were out yesterday and sub recorded your attendance on paper you can go back and enter the attendance for the prior day.