Attendance absence alerts

Upload your full daily attendance export and Elira texts and calls each absent student's guardian bilingually the same morning.

During the school year, Elira can tell guardians their child was marked absent — the same morning, in English and Spanish. Send your whole daily roster, present students included: only the absences reach a family, and the present days are what the chronic-absence figures on that page are measured against.

How it works

1. Export your daily attendance from your SIS as a CSV — every student, not just the absent ones, with an attendance status column. Student name + attendance status + guardian phone are what matter; email, grade, and language columns help but aren't required. PowerSchool Quick Export, ATS and Illuminate all produce this file.
2. Upload it on the Attendance page. Only absences contact a family, unless you switch on late-arrival texts (below). A student marked Present is filed and nobody is called, texted or emailed about them; the same is true of a student marked Tardy until you turn that option on.
3. Call first (default): Elira calls each guardian with a short automated notice — it announces itself as an automated call from your school and repeats the message so voicemail catches it in full. Once the call finishes, answered or not, the bilingual text and email follow, so the notice is on record in writing and a household with more than one child can see which child it names. Calls are placed between your chosen start time and noon Eastern; a list uploaded after that still sends the text and email the same day, just without the call.
4. Prefer no calls? Choose Text & email only in the notification settings — every guardian then gets the bilingual text + email immediately instead.
5. Choose your delivery time in the same settings card: 9:00 AM Eastern (default), 10:00 AM Eastern, or On upload — notifications go out the moment the day's list is uploaded. A list uploaded after your scheduled time is delivered right away — a late upload never means a skipped notification.
6. The Attendance page shows today's list with a check per family notified.

Good to know

• Once you've synced your phone number, attendance calls display your school's own office number — a guardian calling back reaches your real front desk.
• Calls and texts now respect the family's own time zone, not just yours. Every automated call and text has to fall between 8:00 AM and 8:00 PM in Eastern Time *and* in the recipient's local time, worked out from their area code. Federal rules key the quiet-hours restriction to where the person being called actually is, so a guardian with a west-coast number is no longer texted at 5:00 AM their time — that send is simply held until their morning. Nothing changes for New York numbers.
• Every automated call — enrollment and attendance — now uses the same keypad map, so no digit means two different things across the calls one family gets:

- press 1 — hear the message again - press 6 — *attendance calls only:* stop future attendance phone calls. Texts and emails keep coming, and Elira texts back the word that turns the calls on again (CALLS). This is a channel preference, not an opt-out. - press 7 — wrong number. That number is suppressed permanently. - press 8 — stop all automated calls, texts and emails from your school to that number, permanently. Same meaning on every call. - press 9 — transfer to your main office.

• This changed on 28 July 2026. Attendance previously used press 9 to stop the calls, which clashed with press 9 = main office on enrollment calls: a guardian who learned "9 stops the calls" and pressed it on a seat offer got put through to a person and nothing was recorded. If your enrollment forms or family handouts print the old digit, update them to the map above.
• Attendance calls need your main office number on file. Elira will not place an automated attendance call for a school that hasn't supplied one — federal rules require every recorded call to state a number the family can call back — and that family gets the text and email instead. Add it on the school config page.
• The call says the student's first name only — "our records show Maria was marked absent today." A phone call plays to whoever picks up, and to any answering machine in the room, so it deliberately says less. The text and email notices use the full name, so a family with more than one child at your school knows exactly which child the notice is about.
• The same consent rules apply as enrollment outreach — see Text, call & email consent. Families who chose "texts only" are never called.
• Re-uploading the same file is safe: each student is only notified once per day.
• Which statuses we read, and what each one does. *Present · In Attendance · Attended · P* and *Tardy · Late* — filed, nobody contacted. *Half Day · Partial* — filed as half a day. *Absent · A · Excused · Unexcused* — the guardian is notified (an excused absence still counts; the notice reports missed instruction, and we never ask you why a student was out). *Suspension* — filed and counted as a day not present, but the family is not contacted; see below. *Withdrawn · Not Enrolled · Inactive* and *Holiday · No Session · Closed* — filed and left out of the attendance figures entirely. A column literally named "Absent" holding Yes/No works too. Anything else we can't read is not filed, and the upload tells you how many rows that was.
• A suspended student's family hears nothing from us. You decided the suspension and you have already spoken to them — a text saying their child "was marked absent today" would tell them what they know, in words that are wrong about why. The day still counts as a day not present in the chronic-absence figures, because that is what New York requires. The student appears on your daily list under Suspension, with a note that nobody was contacted.
• Two students with the same name need a student ID column. Each day is filed against a student identifier — *Student ID · SIS ID · Local ID · Student Number · OSIS · State ID*, whichever your export has. Without one we match on the name, which is fine until two children share it: then we cannot tell them apart, and rather than guess (and risk sending one family a notice about another family's child) we refuse the upload and name the two students. Add the ID column your SIS already exports and it goes through.
• A CSV with no status column at all can only be read as an absentee-only list, so every row in it is treated as absent — a full roster without a status column would notify every family in your school. The upload warns you when this happens.
• A student marked Tardy is counted present for the day, and by default their guardian hears nothing. Until recently a tardy row sent that family the absence notice, which was wrong in the one direction that matters: the child was in school.
• Late-arrival notifications are an option you switch on, and they are off until you do. On the Attendance page, *Late arrival (tardy) notifications* has two settings, Off and On. Off is the default for every school. On, a student marked late gets their guardian one bilingual text and nothing else — no automated call, no email, no more than once per student per school day — saying the child arrived late. It never says they were absent, because they were not. Your absence notices are unchanged either way. Switching back to Off takes effect straight away — the setting is read at the moment notifications go out, not when the file was uploaded, so a day you have already uploaded stops sending late-arrival texts too.
• If turning it on is refused. Late-arrival notifications need a consent form that mentions them. The guardian consent language in packets before v2.8 covers absence notices, and a family who agreed to those has not agreed to a text about arriving late — so if that is the wording your school executed, pressing On answers with that reason instead of switching. Countersign your updated packet, use its consent wording on your enrollment application from then on, and On takes effect.
• Uploads are refused until your onboarding packet is signed. An attendance file is student data, and the packet is what licenses us to hold it, so the upload answers with that reason rather than accepting the file. It also needs your executed data-protection agreement to be version 2.3 or later. If your school signed an earlier one, open a ticket and we'll reissue it.
• A guardian who has opted out is skipped, on every channel. A family that replied STOP, unsubscribed, or pressed 8 on a call is suppressed for calls, texts and emails alike, and re-uploading their child's row does not undo it — only the family opting in again does. Their child still appears on your daily list with no tick under Texted or Called, so your office can see who to reach in person.
• Skipping a day costs you nothing. A date with no row for a student sits in neither side of the attendance fraction — that is the enrolled-days rule, not a workaround.
• Column names are flexible ("Student", "Guardian Phone", "Learner name", etc. all work). If your export isn't recognized, open a ticket with a sample row and we'll map it.

The card at the bottom of the same tab reads these uploads over the whole year — see Chronic absence and attendance tiers. Sending the full roster is what makes that card work: an attendance rate is absences measured against the days a student was *enrolled and present*, so an absentee-only export can never produce one.