This resource is provided by ACSA Partner4Purpose 6crickets.
One afternoon during the after-school hours, Ms. Ofelia Fitzpatrick, Program Specialist in Expanded Learning Programs at Rialto Unified School District, was notified about an emergency taking place at a middle school. It was a lockdown situation that involved district dispatch and local police. However, Ms. Fitzpatrick was working at a different school which was a 10 minute drive from the incident school. She needed to implement a lockdown procedure right away.
Emergencies like this happen. Handling such emergencies in the out-of-school time can be challenging. A district or a school often has many activities going on at the same time including extended care programs and enrichment clubs. The activities may be provided by various parties, from district staff, to community based organizations providing care programs, to enrichment vendors teaching clubs. It is a complex operation often with student data scattered across numerous systems, and sometimes, across organization boundaries with employees working for different organizations. This makes it difficult to know where students are and who is teaching them.
For example, in a common scenario, different community partners serving a district may each use a separate system for registration and attendance, providing districts only weekly updates. This leaves districts without real-time, up-to-date attendance data.
In another common scenario, although there is a registration and attendance process for the entire after-school program, there isn’t one for enrichment clubs, which can take place in different rooms with different instructors. This makes it difficult to identify the students and their clubs, the instructors and their assigned rooms.
Luckily for Ms. Fitzpatrick, Rialto USD had adopted online, real-time rosters and attendance tracking for expanded learning programs. This enabled her to immediately launch a lockdown process. She looked up all the instructors at the school online and could see all the students in attendance right at that moment. She was then able to instruct the lead teacher to lock down and keep the students in place. She was also able to communicate with the families of the students in attendance about the situation.
So, the real-time after-school roster and attendance along with efficient communication mechanisms allowed Ms. FitzPatrick to implement the lockdown process smoothly that day.
Ensuring student safety in out-of-school time programs requires a holistic, modern system. The more you digitize the entire expanded learning operations to enable anywhere, anytime access to real-time student rosters and attendance, the safer your children will be.
Happy New School Year!
Yours in Education,
6crickets team
Learn more about how to build rosters automatically through family online registration, achieve real-time attendance tracking, or synchronize with your district’s Student Information System by scheduling a time to talk to 6crickets.
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