Our SIS Already Tracks This. Why Expanded Learning Attendance Still Breaks

I hear this in the first 10 minutes of most IT meetings. Our student information system already tracks attendance. Why would we buy another place to mark who showed up.

The SIS is doing its job. It is tracking the bell. Expanded learning is a different day, a different adult, and a different file.

Education Code 46120 requires nine combined hours of instruction and expanded learning on a school day

The SIS is the school day

Period attendance, tardies, independent study, the register that feeds ADA. That is the SIS. It should stay the system of record for that work.

After the bell, the questions change. Who checked in. Who left at 4:10 with an authorized adult. Who was in ELO-P for that stretch, and who moved into Attendance Recovery for two hours. Who has a signed enrollment form on file even if they have not attended yet.

CALPADS Flash #305 makes the split official. Attendance Recovery days go on the STAS file. Expanded learning enrollment and participation go on the LEAP file, program code 194, with a count of days from 0 through 300. Those are not the same field. They are not even the same file.

A participation day is not a period

CDE is almost too plain. There is not a specific amount of time a student must attend an expanded learning program to count as a day for CALPADS. Five minutes counts. Two hours counts. Before school plus after school on the same date still counts as one day.

That is the opposite of how Recovery works. One Recovery day is the minimum minutes for the grade, which can be banked across sessions, per Education Code 46211(e). A pupil can sit in both programs in the same year. CDE still directs that in a given stretch of minutes the pupil is in Recovery or in expanded learning, not both at once. Those minutes still travel on different files. Recovery days go on STAS. Expanded learning days go on LEAP. Flash 305 keeps those collections apart.

Your SIS period code does not know that stretch. It knows second period was present.

Education Code 60902 tells the department to collect expanded learning enrollment in CALPADS beginning in 2025-26. CDE then directs LEAs to submit a LEAP record for every pupil with a signed registration form, including pupils who attended zero days. Enrollment is not attendance. Attendance is not minutes. Minutes still matter when ASES or 21st CCLC rules are in the same room.

Auditors are not reading your period register

If you take ASES money, the 2026-27 audit guide, section U tells the auditor to trace reported pupils served to written records, and to test early release against the local policy.

If you take ELO-P money, section DZ is the offering test: access, the combined nine-hour day, the 30 nonschool days, the ratios in Education Code 46120. Offering is not the same as a check-in. You still need a local attendance trail for the programs that require one.

I have sat with expanded learning directors who were sure the SIS “already had it” because the student was marked present at 8:15. The afternoon clipboard still had gaps. Fiscal could not defend the count.

Where the SIS copy breaks

Check-in is not a period
The afternoon needs a time stamp, an authorized pickup, and a site, not a homeroom bubble.
Two programs, one cafeteria
ELO-P and Recovery can share a building. They cannot share the same minutes. CDE is direct.
Enrollment is not attendance
Flash 305 wants the signed form even when the day count is zero.
Written records still get sampled
ASES pupils served still have to trace to a record the auditor can open. A period flag is not that record.

What we actually sync

Attendly, Inc. does not replace the SIS. We read from it.

We sync with Aeries, PowerSchool, and Q (Aequitas). The sync is read-only and one-way. It runs multiple times a day. It is not real-time. The SIS stays the system of record. We do not write back.

For Attendance Recovery, the PowerSchool absence pull is live. That is the school-day absence list Recovery has to attach to. It is not expanded learning check-in.

The afternoon still has to be taken in the afternoon. Rosters can arrive from the SIS. The check-in cannot.

If you want the longer operational version of that split, we already published Why OST programs care so much about attendance tracking and The Hidden Costs of Manual Attendance Tracking in After-School Programs. For Aeries-specific plumbing, the Aeries afterschool integration post stays up. For Recovery as a program, use the 2026-27 hub.

I am not asking IT to give up the SIS. I am asking expanded learning not to pretend a period register is a participation day. Flash 305 already told us they are different numbers.