Got a great question via email from Dave Rothauser:

"How do teachers interact with the system? When do they use it? At the beginning of class? Is this connected to a period attendance system? Do schools have any trouble with teachers not using one of these systems?"

In my experience, morning arrival is the most important time to record lateness, so I'd probably limit it to that for starters and perhaps use hall-sweeps to handle it if you have trouble with kids dangling in hallways in later periods.  I've left the date and arrival time editable in the form so teachers can use paper-based logs and transfer the data later, if they want.

A system I've seen work really well, at a minimum of disruption to class:  Late arriving students must stop in the main office for a timestamped hallway pass, where office staff record latenesses in the database and dole out lunch detention for recent repeat offenders.   Teachers simply do not admit late students without a pass.

One thought I had was whether to add "Excused" or "Unexcused" as a form field.    I was assuming the lateness would only be logged if unexcused, but others may differ here.

In general, I find teachers tend to readily cooperate with data entry tasks that have a clear value-add and allow them to be more effective, and where transparency encourages peer-based accountability.   When these systems really work, it's usually inside of an advisory "caseload" model, where faculty advisors and grade-level team leaders are accountable for school-home outreach on a specific group of students, and is able to easily scan important analytics to catch at-risk kids early.   That said, building this into an existing school culture would obviously take a great deal of intentionality.  Start building from where the teachers currently experience the most inefficiency and percieved ineffectiveness.

Here are some other important live analytics I've seen as part of a system like this:

• Conduct / Intervention / Communication
• Current Grades (use an online gradebook that exports in CSV...update weekly)
• Attendance Logs (export from your district's attendance-keeping SIS, import daily)
• Cumulative Attendance
• Cumulative Lateness
• Class Removals
• Cumulative Class Removals
• Lunch and After-School Tutoring Attendance
• Cumulative Tutoring Attendance
• Early Dismissals
• Cumulative Early Dismissals
• Extra-curricular participation
• Suspensions
• Outstanding Credits / State Exams
• PSAT Scores

I've also heard of principals creating friendly competitions amongst teachers and students to encourage use of these systems.   Feeding live charts of group analytics to a large flatpanel in the school's entryway could provide for all kinds of fun!