Audio Transcript

To save guardians time from being required to call the school to enter their student’s absence request, you can configure absence requests to allow guardians to submit them right from Family Access. You can determine what fields guardians need to complete when filling out an absence request. Let’s begin the process by heading over to the Family/Student Access Configuration screen within the Portal Access module. After selecting the Attendance tab, we can check the box for Allow Absence Requests if we want guardians to be able to submit absence requests in Family Access. Once checked, we’ll see additional fields display. We can then determine if we want to require guardians to enter an attendance reason when filling out an absence request. Additionally, we could require guardians to enter a comment for the absence request if we’d like. The Only Allow Custodial Guardian to Submit box can be checked if only custodial guardians should be able to enter absence requests in Family Access. If we wanted to allow guardians to enter or update any past absences, we could check the corresponding box. Additional fields populate and we can indicate how many days guardians will be allowed to create or update a past absence. We can then determine the Day Count Type. We’ll select School so guardians can update or add absence requests for previous school days. For our example, this means that guardians can go back five school days to update or add absence requests. Once finished, we’ll save our changes. Since we’ve specified that attendance reasons are required, we’ll select the attendance reasons that should be given for guardians to use. Let’s save. Now, let’s see what this configuration looks like within Family Access. If we select the Attendance tile, we’ll see that we have the option to enter in absence requests. Now that you know how to configure absence requests, you can be sure that guardians will be able to quickly enter absence requests within Family Access.