At-Risk Student Feature

Every teacher knows the feeling of realizing in April that a student has been quietly sliding since October. The information was there the whole time — a grade drifting down, absences collecting, assignments not turned in — but nothing put the pieces together and said look at this one.

iGradePlus 12 will. At-Risk will let you describe what “needs attention” means at your institution, and then watch for it continuously, so a student who meets your description appears on a list rather than waiting to be noticed.

How it works today

Finding these students is something people do by looking. A teacher scans their gradebook and sees who is behind. An administrator runs a report, reads down the column, and notes the names worth following up on. The grades, the attendance, and the assignment records are all there, and they are accurate.

For a small school, and for a teacher who knows every student by name, that works well. Nobody needs a system to tell them who is struggling in a class of eighteen.

Here is where it reaches its limits.

The information waits to be asked for. It never comes forward on its own, so a student in difficulty is found when somebody happens to check the right thing — which might be the week it starts, or a term later.

Each piece sits on its own. Grades are in one place, attendance in another, missing work in a third. The student who is failing outright is easy to see in any of them. The student who is a little behind in all three — nothing alarming in isolation — is the one nobody spots, and often the one who most needed spotting.

Consistency depends on who is looking. Two teachers watching for different things, or the same teacher watching more closely in a quiet week than a busy one, is simply what happens when the standard lives in people’s heads rather than being written down.

None of these are defects. They are what happens when a system records information faithfully and leaves every judgment about what it means to the people using it. Version 12 will let you write some of that judgment down.

What will change in iGradePlus 12

You will describe what puts a student at risk. iGradePlus will watch for it.

The description takes the form of one or more levels, each with its own conditions. A student who meets a level’s conditions is placed at that level, and appears on the At-Risk list with the reasons that put them there:

Watch      ← any one of:   average below 78  ·  4 or more absences
At-Risk    ← any one of:   average below 73  ·  6 or more absences  ·  3 or more missing assignments
Critical   ← any two of:   below passing in any class  ·  8 or more absences  ·  2 or more behavior incidents

That is the whole idea. What follows is what you can put in those conditions, and who gets to set them.

Levels, in your words

The levels above are an example, not a fixed set. You will name them, order them, and decide how many you want.

A school that wants nothing more than a single list defines one level and never thinks about it again. A school that wants to separate “keep an eye on this” from “act on this today” defines two or three. When a student meets more than one, the most serious one is the one that shows.

Because you choose the names, you also choose the language. Nothing requires a student to be labelled “At-Risk” — a school that prefers “Needs Support” simply calls the level that, and that is the wording everyone sees.

What can put a student on the list

Conditions will be able to draw on four kinds of information:

• Grades — a class average, a grading period average, or a cumulative GPA
• Attendance — how many times, or how often, a student has been marked with the attendance codes you choose
• Assignments — how much work is missing, overdue, or scored zero
• Behavior — how many incidents, of what seriousness

Each condition covers a period you set — a grading period, a whole year, or a rolling window such as the last thirty days, which is how chronic absence is usually described.

Attendance conditions will use your own attendance codes. iGradePlus doesn’t decide for you what counts as a concerning absence, because schools don’t agree on it: some count only unexcused absences, some count everything, some track particular codes of their own. A condition names the codes it counts, so it means what your school means.

A level can require any single condition to be met, or two or more together. That second option is what catches the student who isn’t failing anything and isn’t chronically absent, but is slipping on both at once — the case any single threshold misses.

Where the line is drawn

A condition on grades can be set three ways: as a number, as a letter from your grade scale, or simply as below passing.

That last one is likely to be the most useful, and it needs no maintenance at all. Your grade scale already knows which mark is failing, so “below passing” means the right thing everywhere it is used — including in an institution where two schools grade differently, or a class that runs on its own scale. Set it once at the top and it stays correct wherever it lands.

Who sets the criteria

Definitions are set at the top and can be taken over further down — the same set-once-and-inherit arrangement used elsewhere in version 12.

In the free gradebook

You set them. Your gradebook is the top of the structure, so the criteria are yours, and you can vary them for a particular class if one of your classes needs a different standard.

In the Enterprise SIS

The system defines a starting set that applies everywhere. A campus or school can take ownership of its own if its situation differs — an alternative program and a selective high school rarely want the same thresholds. A teacher can do the same for their classes.

Where a level doesn’t define its own, it uses the definition from above, so a district that wants one standard everywhere configures it once.

The school and the teacher can see it differently

This is the part worth understanding, because it is deliberate.

When a teacher looks at their At-Risk list, it is built from their criteria applied to their classes. When an administrator looks at the school’s list, it is built from the school’s criteria applied across every class in the school. Those two questions have different answers, and both are correct.

So a student may be on the school’s list and not on their history teacher’s. That isn’t a disagreement to resolve. The school is asking whether this student is in difficulty overall; the teacher is asking whether they are in difficulty in this class. A student failing two other subjects while doing fine in history is exactly that student.

A teacher’s own settings will never change what the school sees, and a school’s will never override what a teacher has chosen to watch for in their own classes. But teachers will see the school’s determination alongside their own, marked as the school’s — because a concern raised at the school level should reach the person who sees that student every day.

It will always tell you why

A name on a list is not much use on its own. Every entry will carry the conditions that put it there — six absences this term, 68% in Chemistry — along with when the student reached that level and when the list was last brought up to date.

That is what makes the list something to act on rather than something to interpret, and it is what lets you tell quickly whether a student needs a conversation, a call home, or an intervention plan.

Sharing with students and families

At-Risk will be a staff feature by default. Nothing is shown to a student or a guardian unless you decide it should be.

When you do want to share, it will be a choice you make for each level and each audience separately. A school might show families the earliest level — where the news is still “here is what we are seeing, and there is time to fix it” — while handling the most serious level in a conversation with a counselor instead of on a portal page. Students and guardians are settable independently, and for a student whose parents live apart, sharing can be limited to the primary guardian.

What this will mean for you

• If you teach your own classes on the free gradebook, you get the same feature the districts get, sized to you — your criteria, your classes, and a list that keeps itself current instead of waiting for you to go looking through a gradebook mid-term.
• If you run a school, the standard for “needs attention” becomes something written down and applied the same way to every student, every day, rather than something that varies with who is looking and how busy the week has been.
• If you run a district, you can set one definition across every school and let a campus or school depart from it where it genuinely differs — and see the same measure applied consistently when you compare them.
• If you are a counselor or work in student support, the students who need you will arrive with the reasons attached, including the ones who never trip any single threshold badly enough to stand out.