I see the problem with using the word 'report'... maybe 'notify' would be better:
What I am after is for Parents to be able to log-in and notify ('report-to') the school that their child will be absent on a day, in a form that will link to the child's SIMS Register [having been reviewed by a member of staff - either school office or the first-period registrant] rather than waiting until the school is open and overloading admin/queuing the phones.
In an ideal world, this would be input from the Parents' SLG dashboard screen, so it would be a TWO-way communication hub between School-Parent (and already identity-verified), but it might be that there is a good Partner or third-party solution already out there. Then to make that parental communication automatically apparent/visible in SIMS.
The objective is to make parentally-notified absences apparent to classroom teachers as early as start of first-registration in the morning, AND to reduce administration overload with phoned-in notifications of absence and manual changes to registers. Real unauthorised absences can then be identified more quickly and targetted parents notified that their child has not arrived (e.g. SIMS InTouch).
