Beginning on Malvern’s first day of the 2022-23 school year, SchoolPass was rolled out as a way for attendance and emergencies to be simplified and hypothetically become more time-efficient. SchoolPass introduced “scanning in,” where students used a QR Code on their phones to scan into an iPad in each classroom. This accounted for normal attendance, which, in previous years, put the teacher in charge to mark a student absent, late, or in attendance. With initial high hopes, Malvern’s use of SchoolPass for attendance was ultimately not successful. 

“We had found that despite changing up some things and working around the roadblocks, [SchoolPass] had still taken us a great amount of time. Its failure to sync with MyMalvern in the way that we hoped resulted in inaccurate attendance data,” Korin Folan, Head of Student Leadership, said.

Shortly after SchoolPass’s implementation, its attempts at protecting students failed, producing a safety problem. Folan highlighted troubles with SchoolPass’s Emergency Management System, and how they were part of the decision to end its use. 

“2 weeks ago, we ran a fire drill and the emergency management system did not work the way we needed it to. We have been having meetings all throughout the past two months and the decision was made recently that Malvern will stop using SchoolPass,” Folan said. 

With the stoppage of Schoolpass, these meetings also evaluated attendance going forward. Taking inspiration from last year and looking forward to a hopefully simplified day for students and faculty, attendance and emergency systems used in previous years will work with reimagined SchoolPass features for the rest of this year.

“We are going back to taking attendance in MyMalvern, which means that students will not be scanning in and teachers will take attendance at the start of the period,” Folan said. “Feedback we received from parents was that they really liked using the feature on SchoolPass where they could note their son’s attendance. We have worked with Marketing and Communications to create an attendance form that parents can access on our website.”

Folan emphasized how feedback and ideas about time-efficiency were instrumental in creating the attendance and emergency plan going forward. To deliver this experience, attendance for the whole community is located in one place: MyMalvern.

“[Malvern] Recently hired Ms. Erika Gibson [Attendance Coordinator] will oversee all of attendance and make the process a lot easier in MyMalvern,” Folan said. 

Ms. Gibson looks to deliver a streamlined attendance and emergency response experience that will save students, faculty, and parents lots of time. Moving away from protective and possibly excessive tracking and protection of students, Malvern has optimized previous systems to take on the rest of the 2022-23 school year with simplicity and safety.