PowerSchool Custom Report: Attendance Tracking Report

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em

Are you tired of running 5 different reports and manually adding up numbers just to get the attendance totals you need? I am! There are children who need our attention and we're using our precious time scribbling down addition problems.  

We need a quick method to see group attendance data on one page that is already totaled and categorized by excused vs. unexcused. I decided to take on this task today with the inspirational background noise of Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview playing on Netflix. By the way, it is a very interesting interview and he shared some wisdom that I think applies to our plight:

Humans are tool builders and we build tools that can dramatically amplify our human abilities." 

-Steve Jobs

PowerSchool, like any piece of technology, is a tool that we can implement to multiply our efforts. Lets put down our calculators and let PowerSchool do the work for us. I'm pretty excited about how this turned out and hope it is helpful for you as well!  

What Do I do Next?

You may need to first import this report into your Powerschool system in order to use it. There are resources at the end of this post that will walk you through how to do this. 

Currently I am aware that this report is available in the following counties in NC:
Wake
Johnson

Continue reading for instructions on how to use this report, a downloadable guide, and the code to import this report into Powerschool for your county if you don't already have access to it. 

PowerSchool Tutorial: Print Reports

Reports, Reports, and More Reports!

The Print Reports function offers many different reports that can be run on individual students or groups of students. There are several different methods to select a group of students to work with, but we’re going to focus on working with a Stored Selection. If you would like to learn how to create a saved group of students with Stored Selections, check out my previous tutorial on how to create a group as well as instructions on working with a group.  

Once you have that figured out then come back here and continue reading for instructions on how to run all different kinds of reports to get the data you need.

PowerSchool Tutorial: Working With Saved Groups

What can I do with my group?

Once you have created your group there are tons of things that you can do with it. Let's go through how to get back to your Stored Selection (your saved group) so that you can get all kinds of data on these students. There is also a downloadable guide that you can save and print for later reference that details how to edit your group.

Continue reading to learn all about working with groups.