Secretaries
Responsibility for populating and maintaining the core school database usually falls to the school secretary. This is a critical role which must be done accurately and thoroughly in order to provide the basic information required by the principal and teachers.
This role may seem burdensome, especially since Overseer does not replace all of the tasks which might otherwise be performed by an office suite. However, by centrally managing the school database, the teachers and principal can realize significant time savings. The new capabilities for data mining and printing many useful reports for the school staff should bring real benefits to the secretary.
The core data entry tasks for secretaries are outlined in Chapter 3 of the Overseer Getting Started Manual. These are mainly performed on first installing Overseer Admin, or at the beginning of each school year. They include setting up database preferences, entering families, adults and children. Staff members must be identified from among the adults, then teachers selected from the staff members. Children may be identified as prospects, or enrolled as students in the local school, as of specific dates. For each school session, the secretary must create an Overseer “class” for each group of students at a common grade level, with a common program, and in the same home room. A home room teacher must then be assigned to each class.
There are many optional types of data which secretaries may choose to record and manage through Overseer. These include student timetables, teacher duties, bus routes, information about organizations in the school support community, contacts for various school services, volunteers for in-school classes and programs, alumni, committees, school clubs, etc.
If a school is using Overseer to print report cards, then the secretary may have a major role in defining subject areas and components for each class, or importing custom report card designs for each class. In either case, the correct teacher assignments must be given for each subject area, and subject component, for each class, before teachers begin working with Overseer Grades or Overseer LAN. Also, the required marking schemes must be established for use in Overseer Grades.
Daily student attendance tracking may be performed by the school secretary through Overseer Admin, in which case term attendance will be automatically available to be printed on report cards at the end of each term. Another option is for teachers to track student attendance daily through Overseer LAN, in which case term attendance will be automatically available to be printed on report cards at the end of each term. Alternatively, teachers may log attendance information manually during each term, then record attendance summary data at the end of term via Overseer Grades or Overseer LAN for transfer to report cards.
Creating and maintaining regular backups of the school’s main Overseer database is a responsibility which may be assigned to the school secretary. This is a very simple task, but could pay big dividends if a database should become corrupt beyond recovery by the normal Rebuild Database utility.
