Roll call: Minnesota schools face challenges of counting students from afar

Taking attendance was once as easy as glancing across a classroom and noting which desks were empty. But that was in a pre-pandemic school year.

Now, for many metro-area students, showing up to class means logging into a school-provided iPad. In Anoka-Hennepin schools, teachers host a daily video call to take roll of students in remote learning. Rather than counting desks, they count the faces on the screen.

"We were really faced with disrupting what were longstanding attendance practices and having to reinvent them on the fly," Joel VerDuin, chief technology and information officer for Anoka-Hennepin schools, said of the attendance-tallying strategy launched this year.

https://www.startribune.com/roll-call-minnesota-schools-face-challenges-of-counting-students-from-afar/572702491/