[LM_NET] Target: Overdues - There must be a better way

[Janice Davies <jgdavies2004@YAHOO.COM>]

  Two weeks ago I went through getting the books/fines taken care of with the 
seniors, and now I am dealing with the underclassmen. With three days of school 
remaining, we currently have 116 students who still owe books and about that many 
that owe fines.
   
  Getting students to take care of their obligations is time consuming process at 
my school and I am hoping to find a more efficient way to do this.
   
  I work in a high school library with about 2,000 students. Overdue fees are 10 
cents a day. I put an upper limit on fines of $3 per book per semester and add on 
$3 for books that aren't returned by the end of the school year to prevent students 
dropping their books off mid-summer without paying fines.
   
  We put in holds on the records of students who have not taken care of their 
obligations. Parents will probably not be aware that their students have 
outstanding obligations till next week when they get a notice of obligation instead 
of their childrens' report cards. 
   
  I try to send out notices in advance to let students know that they are having a 
hold put on their records so they have time to take care of them before the end of 
the school year. We make copies of these notices, enter the holds in the county 
mainframe computer (which is how the central office is told not to send a report 
card) then we file the copy in our Hold Book.
   
  Some students bring back their books and drop them in the drop box so there are 
likely to be a lot of holds on books  that need to be cleared, but unless students 
bring them to us and pay their fines, we often don't know to change it from a hold 
on a book to a hold on a fine.
   
  The other thing I have problems with is that it's hard to avoid putting in more 
than one hold for the same fine. When I run overdue notices (We use Accent by 
Sagebrush) we can select the dates that the books were due, and in that way we 
avoid putting holds in the same book twice, but I can't figure out how to avoid 
doing that with fines. When I print out the fine list in June, it gives me students 
who acrued those fines in October and there's not a way for me to tell the 
difference, other than to go through the hold book manually and take out the ones 
that are already in there.
   
  I would like to be able to go through a printout of the county mainframe computer 
database and check against my circulation computer database for errors, but I can't 
do that because only one secretary in the school has the ability to print from the 
central office database and she refuses to do it except at the end of the year. 
This makes me nervous because we do make mistakes and that means irate parents 
coming in.
   
  This past week I realized that we would not be able to print out the hold notices 
in time to distribute them to the students before they leave for the summer. Even 
though the last day of school is this Friday, many students finish their exams by 
Tuesday and many don't come for the last three days. 
   
  I decided to post a list of the students (a 34 page printout) with their 
obligations in the main lobby in the hope that students will have fair warning 
before the end of the year.
   
  If you have a smoother, more efficient, less stressful way of dealing with 
overdues, I'd appreciate it if you'd share it and I will post a hit. 
   
  Jan Davies, Library Media Specialist
  Laurel High School
  Laurel, Maryland
  jgdavies2004@yahoo.com
   

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