Creating a Digital Child Care Attendance System

“Teacher: [taking attendance] Bueller? Bueller? Bueller?"

"Student: Um, he's sick. My best friend's sister's boyfriend's brother's girlfriend heard from this guy who knows this kid who's going with the girl who saw Ferris pass out at 31 Flavors last night. I guess it's pretty serious.”

                   – Scene from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

Taking attendance has always been problematic for teachers. Now, the federal government is requiring us to improve our attendance records for child care subsidies. Since they provide the bulk of the funds we use to pay for the subsidies we have to take this seriously.

We’re taking the opportunity to modernize this process in order to make providing child care easier for providers, easier on program administrators, less expensive to tax payers, more accurate and take less time for everyone involved.  

We know that child care providers don’t go into business dreaming about taking attendance and administrative red tape. Storing paper attendance records, submitting requested records via fax, reconciling attendance and subsidy billing; these are all headaches that take time to untangle. For providers, this is time that could be better spent engaging with children, taking advantage of education opportunities, or doing the thousand other things they need to run a successful business. 

There are a lot of important questions we’re considering as we go through this project: will the data collected from the system be secure (absolutely); will the attendance system we’re purchasing be available in languages other than English (we’re working on that); will providers have to pay for the system (the software will be free); and many more. The team working on it has put answers to many of these questions on a new webpage, found here. 

We’re not replacing the painful billing system yet, but collecting attendance electronically is necessary before we can do that. Replacing billing is high on our priority list for improving the system.

We don’t yet have a set date when all providers accepting subsidy have to begin using the new digital attendance system, but we’ll have more information about implementation dates by August of this year. Keep an eye on the project webpage (https://www.del.wa.gov/Attendance-Project) for timing and ways that you can be involved in the project. 

Ross Hunter

Director, Washington State Department of Early Learning