How to Enter Minor Infractions

Not all schools use Minor Infractions as part of their own school wide Honor Level System plan. When we set up a school for the first time, we usually ignore this feature. As the school gets used to the program and starts to tune it to match their own needs, we might find that the difference between Minor and Regular Infractions provide a good solution to concerns or issues that their staff and/or parents have.

How are Minor Infractions Different?

During the school day, teachers and other staff members typically use a pad of infractions slips to cite students who have failed to meet your school expectations and will therefore need to be assigned one of your stages of consequence.

These slips are dropped of at some designated location, perhaps a box on the counter in the main office, and then entered later into the HLS program.

You begin this process of entering the infractions by clicking thebutton on the home screen.

The following screen appears and here is where you do most of your work:

Schools that are using either Simple Networking or Full Networking may see that their window is slightly different from the one shown here. It will contain additional and different features. Click here to see the networking verison of this window.

Entering the Infractions

You enter your data at the bottom of the form. For example if you have a slip from Mr. Weston, citing Patti Cake for item "D - Move through the building in an orderly manner," you enter this as shown here:

 

We have stream-lined this process so that it can be done as quickly as possible. There are only three pieces of data that you need to enter. We have written the program so that you can do all of this work with your keyboard. Your mouse is not necessary. There is no need to use captial letters. All of your work can be entered in lower-case.

Simply type your entry like this: patti cake [Tab] west [Tab] d [Enter]

Of course, [Tab] and [Enter] refer to keys on your keyboard. The Tab key moves you from box to box on the screen and pressing Enter (or Return) is the same as clicking thebutton. Your entry will then appear in the grid at the top of the window:

 

You then continue entering infractions from the slips. You can tab over data that doesn't change. For example, if Mr. West has handed you slips for three students all cited for the same thing as Patti Cake, you only need to type the other students' names and press [Enter] each time. If the infractions items change but the teacher is the same, tab over the name and enter the new code letters. A counter, next to the box where you enter the names, shows you how many slips you have entered.

Make sure you press [Enter] or clickafter entering the last slip. You want to see it appear in the grid above before you continue.

When you have finished entering infractions click thebutton. The program will begin adding your entries to the student records. The list you have been building will not be processed until you press this button.

If you see any mystakes, you can click the item in the grid to highlight it and then clickto remove it. And then re-enter the infraction.

Entering slips with more than one item checked.

From time to time, your teachers may want to check more than one item on the infraction slip. This is allowed. For example, she might check: Treat peers with respect and Use appropriate language to describe one event. When you enter the slip, enter all of the letters for items that are check. Do not add spaces or commas. For example, if both infraction e and infraction h have been checked, enter them as: eh. The order in which you enter them will not matter. If you enter: he the results will be the same.

When you enter two or more check marks as described above, the student will receive only the demerits of the highest weighted infraction. The demerits are not added up. So if a 3 demerit item and a 5 demerit item are both checked, the student will receive 5 demerits, not 8.
 
Also the student will only move one step through the Stages of Consequence ... not two.
 
If the teacher expects a student to get demerits for both items and be moved up two steps, she should turn in two separate slips.

Choosing the Date for the Infraction

The program will automatically use the current date for the infractions that your enter. You can easily change it if you need to. It helps if you sort the slips in chronological order before you enter then each day. You can adjust the date with theandbuttons in the Use this date frame. The [Page Down] and [Page Up] keys on your keyboard can be used instead of the mouse if find them more convenient.
 

If you want to change the date of an infraction you have already entered, click on it in the upper window and then adjust the date as stated above.

Invallid Entries

The program will warn you if it thinks the entry you are making is invallid and try to help you understand what it thinks is wrong.

If you see a message that says:it means that the letter you have entered from the slip is not in the computer's infraction list. (Click here to learn how you can edit this list.)

There are two windows that look almost exactly the same. One is for entering infractions (as we have discussed here) and the other is for entering Minor Infractions. If you have accidently clicked the wrong button on the home screen, you might be on the wrong window and your infraction codes could be incorrect.

Duplicate Entries

Your program is going to warn you if you ever make two identical entries for the same student. Just in case you are accidently entering slips that have already been entered you will see this message:

 

Behind the box you will see the student's record so you can determine if this is a mistake or if you indeed expect the top two entries to be the same.

No More Entries, Please!

The infractions are not being entered into the students' records as you type them. You are simply building a "job list" and until you click thebutton, this list is vulnerable. We want to encourage you to process the list by clicking the button often. If your computer freezes or the power fails, you will lose your work and have to do it all over again.

It is perfectly alright to clickand thento continue entering as many times as you wish.

We have set a limit on how many infractions you can enter at one time without processing them. If you get carried away you may see this message: