Open Administration for Schools 2.40

Open Admin for Schools is a School Administration Program. It is a freely available, open source software package and is licensed under the GNU General Public License.
Open Administration for Schools project is entirely web based and can run from a centrally located division wide server or a single computer in a school. It is designed to support an entire division on one or more central computers but can also work just fine for a single school.
Currently several school divisions use this approach and have 15+ schools on a single central server. This is because it is designed to be lightweight both in server resource requirements and in communication bandwidth.
It is secure. Each school has two or more virtual websites and each is protected with password(s). One site, the admin site, is used by the school office and another, the teacher site, is used by teachers in the classroom.
The teacher site also has password access for entering attendance by teachers and also uses cookies that expire in a short period, further limiting access. Another site, a parent/student site, is controlled by parent/student userids and passwords. A fourth virtual site may be used by school liason officers from outside agencies to give them a slightly different access to school information. (Community Schools)
Main features:
- Demographics - It stores student and family information that can be viewed and printed in a variety of ways.
- Attendance - Attendance can be entered either by secretaries in the school office or by teachers in the classroom. It features the ability to do different numbers of periods per day for elementary grades vs high school and middle years. This will allow elementary classes to have 2 classes per day (AM/PM) with a homeroom teacher while higher grades can have attendance done on a per subject period basis (and be subject based). Attendance reports are integrated with report cards/progress reports. A variety of attendance reports are available. A variety of attendance entry methods are available for use by teachers and/or secretaries to allow it to integrate with normal school practice.
- Discipline - A simple discipline module to track student discipline events and track outcomes, etc. Behaviours may be categorized and statistical reports may be printed. Enrollment changes are also posted into this system.
- Report Card System - a flexible reporting system with per subject objectives (up to 20), integrated attendance reporting, etc. All report cards are printed as PDF reports and may include a school logo. All subjects may have unlimited length text comments, and can have any desired ordering. Attendance reporting will now do days open, days enrolled, days absent, and times late as standard.
- IEP (Special Needs) Site that is integrated at the division level that allows special needs teachers to tailor individual student programs that can be viewed from each schools teacher site. This includes the ability to add student medical history, testing done, student teams (and responsibilities), and objectives chosen from lists of thousands, categorized in a variety of ways. There can be up to 32 objectives per subject and each subject is specific to that particular child. His/her program would consist of a variety of subjects in areas such as fine motor control, etc.
- This system can generate progress reports (for use with the report card system) as well as a comprehensive IEP report containing the yearly plan for the child. This IEP can also viewed from the teacher site, to ensure compliance throughout the year.
- Export/Import Modules - to allow students to easily transfer schools within divisions without re-entry of demographic information. Export of data to other programs. Export of data to Provincial authorities via an automated XML based transfer mechanism.
- Saskatchewan SDS support for direct XML transfers of student demographic, subject and enrollment marks to provincial authorities.
- Online Gradebook to allow teachers to enter marks and assessments onine from school or home. It can group and weight assessment items and post directly into the report card system.
- Parent Viewing scripts to allow parents to view attendance, gradebook(where allowed), and report card marks. This is easily integrated into existing school sites.
- Upcoming: Family functions, Parent-Teacher Interview Scheduling, Wherever schools want to go...
- Further out... Multi-language support (demand for a Spanish version exists currently), Student timetabling.
Enhancements:
- A new Fees System to allow fee charging (predefined or new, with various groups), invoice printing, payments and receipts, and the ability to export summary journal transactions to an external accounting program.
- A new teacher logout to remove session data has been added.
- There is a new 70 page User Documentation PDF and a 40 page Administration Documentation PDF (also available in HTML versions).