Over the last few months, we’ve made a few updates to language in the SWIS Suite. It’s time for one more. Starting today, we’re saying farewell to two referral category labels:
- Unknown Location from the list of Locations
- Additional Attendance/Saturday School from the list of Actions Taken
All of the labels in SWIS are defined, mutually exclusive (they don’t overlap), and exhaustive. We identified these two labels for the archive for two different reasons. The definition for Additional Attendance/Saturday School overlaps with the Detention label. Using Unknown Location leads to incomplete data for decision making…plus, odds are good someone knows where the behavior actually happened. Moving forward, we recommend using Other in place of Unknown Location and Detention in place of Additional Attendance/Saturday School.
By archiving these two labels, they will no longer appear in their respective drop-down menus on the SWIS referral data entry form, but they will continue to appear on reports generated for dates when the labels were options.
In addition to this update, back in March, we made more changes to the way we talk about behavior in SWIS. With all of these language changes, now is a great time to update your documentation for the upcoming school year. Make sure your referral forms match the labels in SWIS, decide which subcategories to use (if you want to use them at all), and update your school’s behavior definitions to get everyone on the same page. If you don’t know where to start defining behaviors, you can download a copy of our definitions and make them match your context.