In EveryDay Pro you are now able to view cumulative and snapshot data anytime you view monthly metrics. Read on to find out several examples of this.

In the School or District Overview Dashboard, when you scroll down to check out the Attendance Over Time section, you can now click the cumulative button to change the type of data you analyze.

Snapshot metrics include attendance data from the first day of the month to the last day of the month. Snapshot metrics help districts and schools see if there are patterns or trends appearing in particular months that can inform an upcoming school calendar decision. It can also help school attendance teams determine if there are any campaigns that they want to create or design in order to counteract a particularly low attendance month.

Cumulative metrics include data from the start of the school year, to the last day of each month. Tracking the data this way allows school leaders to gather an ongoing representation of how chronic absenteeism rates are progressing throughout the school year. These metrics are also representative of the metrics used for state reporting.

You’ll also see an option to utilize cumulative metrics in the All Students tab and individual student profiles.

In the All Students Tab, click on the settings button to choose whether or not you’d like snapshot or cumulative monthly rates to appear when you download the student list as a CSV.

When looking at an individual student profile, you can turn on cumulative monthly metrics by clicking the button below.

Snapshot views can be particularly helpful when digging deeper into individual student attendance patterns. For example, if a student is chronically absent currently at this point in the school year, but they have had outstanding attendance in the last two months, attendance is trending upward. This is a great opportunity to reach out to the student and their family and recognize those hard efforts and give positive reinforcement. These trends are harder to see when only looking at cumulative attendance metrics.

When looking at the monthly snapshot rates at the school or district level, you have to keep in mind that different students can be considered chronically absent within a month, but if they don't maintain those absence rates, they may not be chronically absent for the year overall. Let's look at an example for Casey:

Casey's Attendance

Casey is not chronically absent in September, because 1/20 is a 5% absence rate.

Casey is not chronically absent in October, because 2/21 is a 9.5% absence rate.

Casey is chronically absent in November, because 2/19 is a 10.5% absence rate.

Casey is not chronically absent overall because their overall absence rate is 8.3%.

What this illustrates is that it's possible for a student to be counted as chronically absent in one month and not in the year-to-date rate. Over all students in a school or district, there could be a lot of students who look like Casey and are chronically absent in some months and not others. This could lead monthly snapshot rates to be higher, on average, than the year-to-date chronic absence rate.

In the table above we see that there is variation from month to month in terms of who is chronically absent. The end result is that 40% of students are chronically absent overall. This is slightly lower than the average of the three months, which would be 43.3%.

If a school or district has a more consistent set of students who are absent, the YTD rate will be closer to the average of the elapsed months. The more variance there is in who is absent, the farther apart the numbers will be.