GA is implementing a new sign-in system sometime between January 2025 and September 2025. This new system will be electronic and require your keycard to function. In addition, the system will ask you basic questions like what house you’re in and It will replace the redundant paper and pen form that GA currently uses.
During the 2022-2023 school year, sitting student body president Sam Wang was asked in his Advanced Topics in Computer Science class to design a project that would help the entire school. So, Sam Wang designed and implemented a digital sign-in system. However, due to the constrained nature of the project, Sam was only able to design the system for faculty. Since then, the digital system has fallen into disrepair without the original programmer fixing it.
However, while the system is flawed in design, the idea and the upsides of a digital system are promising. Currently, the system relies on paper and pencil and a plethora of clipboards, each containing snippets of information such as time of arrival, reason for lateness, and the student’s House. However, the new system would centralize all the information.
“The new electronic system should do all the record-keeping that I need to do,” Ms. Debra Kennedy, Assistant to Head of Upper School, said. “All the information should feed into a single sheet that I would be able to visually see. That’s really important in the time of an emergency because instead of grabbing a whole bunch of different stuff, I could just grab my phone.”
In addition, the electronic system would benefit students during the lunch rush to get out of the school by making signing out much faster. The line that develops outside the office before lunch would be severely reduced, giving students a greater incentive to leave campus.
The electronic system would give students extra time to hang out with friends off campus,” Ms. Kennedy said. “Five minutes on both ends of signing in and out makes a huge difference for students.”
Attendance takes anywhere between two to four periods, which means that the office may not know that you’re absent until right before lunch.
“Today, I am manually doing attendance. I’m already two and a half hours into my day and I still don’t accurately know who is on campus and who is missing,” Ms. Kennedy said. “If we had an electronic system. I would already know who hasn’t signed in and who was absent.”
However, while the system brings many benefits to students, faculty, and staff, the system is extremely difficult to implement. The problems stem from the integration difficulties between the sign-in system and our attendance platform, Veracross.
“The team that’s implementing the system is currently having difficulties choosing a program since they’re all having problems with integration. Mr. Moll, security, and division folks are all trying to get these programs to work with each other,” Ms. Kennedy said. “It’s been the biggest stumbling block because we have looked at this problem over the years and that has always been the biggest problem.”
So, while integration continues to be a problem and progress is slow, efforts to create an electronic sign-in system are underway and under constant improvement.