West Des Moines Community Schools Technology

Update on Missing Assignments Notifications

A few weeks ago, we were notified that the weekly missing assignments emails were not working correctly and the following is an update:

Q1. Is it resolved?
A1.  Yes, the customization that provides the weekly email has been fixed and weekly email notifications will resume on Thursday evenings.

Q2. Why did we get email notifications on dates other than Thursdays?
A2.  In order to test if the fixes worked – we needed to run the custom programming, which released notification emails on dates other than Thursdays.

Q3.  Could you tell us more about these weekly email notifications…  who are they delivered to?  and how is it determined who gets the messages?
A3.  Each Thursday night, the system goes through all grade books and looks for “M’s” (which stand for Missing, which are manually marked by teachers.)   It only looks through the current term/quarter, so if there’s a missing assignment from a previous quarter, that won’t be counted.  Once it has a list of which students have a missing assignment,  an email is then generated  to the primary and secondary email addresses of all guardians.