BCPS implements new attendance policy for online learning
Students’ online attendance being marked throughout the week. Photo by Fenthon Aristhomene
April 17, 2020
On March 30, 2020 online learning began for students as a result of the rapid spread of COVID-19. The closure of schools is just one of the many effects of the virus. Due to this pandemic, the Student Services Department has provided a way to ensure that each student can be marked as absent or present everyday.
Every school day, students are required to login to the website sso.browardschools.com where it will send them to the Clever Portal. Through Clever, students are able to access the other sites they need such as Canvas and Pinnacle. The login is not counted unless it is a fresh login and not from the previous day. Many students are logging in multiple times a day to ensure that their attendance is being accounted for.
“I login twice, once in the morning, and then once after lunch,” sophomore Amoli Kulkarni said.
If a student does not login for the day, an attendance code will distinguish those students and send a message home to their guardians. The code does not represent an absence and instead allows for schools to identify those who aren’t signing in often.
“I have my SSO pre signed in because my computer is used to it,” sophomore Chanel Lee said.
In the beginning of this process, the county had an issue tracking the students attendance through the system. This is because students were not signing in through the best link, which is sso.browardschools.com, instead they were signing in through broward.instructure.com. Student services have now blocked direct access to broward.instructure.com so they force students to sign in through sso.browardschools.com.
“It’s very difficult to track a student’s productivity in this new way of teaching since I don’t have everybody in front of me,” English teacher Stacey Lippel said. “I think the attendance policy in effect is the best we can do under the circumstances for ‘bookkeeping’, it isn’t perfect because it merely tracks the students ability to sign in to clever. It has no correlation to their actual productivity in their class.”
Due to the circumstances, schools are doing everything they can to allow students to learn and they can only accomplish this with 100% of their students online.
