AR Setup Requirements for Districts
This is the internal draft for what needs to be done to set up attendance recovery (AR) for districts.
Districts will fall into different situations: some are already using Attendly heavily and have AR programs running, others are using Attendly but don’t have AR programs yet, some have AR programs but aren’t really using our software much, and some aren’t using Attendly at all and don’t have programs. The setup process will vary depending on where they’re at.
What We Need
To calculate attendance recovery for a district, we need three things:
First, we need their regular school year attendance data. Specifically, we need to know how many absences each student has accumulated during the normal school year. This tells us how much attendance they could potentially recover. Right now, we get this from Aeries for our existing partners. For Romoland, we actually sync this attendance data into our database, which makes everything easy. For other districts, we need to build the same capability - either a full Aeries sync or just a script that counts absences per student. We don’t actually need all the granular attendance data; we just need absence counts.
Second, we need their AR program attendance. This means knowing which students attended which AR programs and for how long. This should already be getting tracked in Attendly if they’re using it properly. The key requirement here is that AR programs need to be tagged with “AR” in our system. Only programs with the AR tag will count toward recovery calculations.
Third, once we have the Aeries absence data and the AR program attendance data from Attendly, and the programs are properly tagged, we can plug everything into the formulas we already have set up. The calculation infrastructure is already built based on what we did for Romoland.
What Needs to Happen
The main technical work is extending the Aeries integration to all districts. Right now only Romoland has the data pipeline working. We need to decide if we’re building a full sync or just a targeted absence-counting function. There’s also the question of how to handle districts that don’t use Aeries.
On the program side, we need a clear process for tagging AR programs. This could be something Customer Success does during setup, or districts could handle it themselves if we give them the right guidance.
Open questions: Do we build a full Aeries sync or just count absences? What about non-Aeries districts? What’s the onboarding flow for districts that don’t have AR programs yet?
Tags: attendance-recovery aeries integration attendly-recovery