No Secretary to take roll for Aaronic Priesthood

With the change to the Aaronic Priesthood being administered by the bishopric, the Aaronic Priesthood does not have a secretary to take roll with the new Calls and Quorum attendance. Could the advisors or specialist have access to that report like an organization's secretary to take roll? Just a feature request. Thanks!

willenium1217 wrote:Could the advisors or specialist have access to that report like an organization's secretary to take roll? Just a feature request. Thanks!

The forum is user-to-user help and support. The best way to get your suggestion to those who can consider it is by using the feedback link found at the bottom of most church web pages. Another method to get suggestions like this to the responsible department is to have your bishop speak to the stake president who then addresses it with the area authority and so on up the chain.

I would guess this is not a case of "wow, we did not see that coming" as much as it is a case of "with the many urgent programming requirements on the list of our very small group of programmers, which are the most critical and which can wait because there is a work-around?"

The bishop doesn't have to enter this information. He has counselors who could do it. I am no longer a clerk, but suspect the clerk could do it by assignment if needed as well. The youth secretaries can fulfill their assignment with pencil and paper. Is it perfect? No. But handcarts were not perfect either - however they were a good workaround when there were no better options available.

But as jdlessley said, feedback and asking your stake president to bring it up in his coordinating council are the two ways to make formal feature requests. Nothing else will work with any degree of assurance.

davesudweeks wrote:I would guess this is not a case of "wow, we did not see that coming" as much as it is a case of "with the many urgent programming requirements on the list of our very small group of programmers, which are the most critical and which can wait because there is a work-around?"

The bishop doesn't have to enter this information. He has counselors who could do it. I am no longer a clerk, but suspect the clerk could do it by assignment if needed as well. The youth secretaries can fulfill their assignment with pencil and paper. Is it perfect? No. But handcarts were not perfect either - however they were a good workaround when there were no better options available.

But as jdlessley said, feedback and asking your stake president to bring it up in his coordinating council are the two ways to make formal feature requests. Nothing else will work with any degree of assurance.

I think the frustration is that it's a new tool that is being rolled out that they just finished programming and their asking everyone to use it but it's not quite ready for prime time. I'm sure it's the quarterly report stats being utterly broken by the change to 2 hour church that is driving it. If someone invented a handcart with one wheel being a different size than the other, I think we'd stop to fix the handcart rather than trying to roll awkwardly forward indefinitely -- especially if they just finished building the handcart and the fix is relatively simple (they obviously have an access control system in place).

Sorry to sound snarky.

chriswoodut wrote:... and their asking everyone to use it but it's not quite ready for prime time.

No offense taken. But, I think this is the key. As I understand, the church is NOT asking EVERYONE to use it. They are asking the ward leaders to use it. It is the ward leaders who are struggling because the youth don't have access. This is not a case of a broken handcart. It is more like a case of a handcart that doesn't work exactly the way I may want it to work, but it works. There are ways for the youth secretaries to participate without a digital device. Those ways may not be the most convenient or the most efficient, but they will work in the interim until something better comes along.

But, hey, that's just my opinion and others are welcome to disagree with me. I do worry about the digital divide we are creating between those who have technology and those who do not (often through no fault of their own).

davesudweeks wrote:

chriswoodut wrote:... and their asking everyone to use it but it's not quite ready for prime time.

No offense taken. But, I think this is the key. As I understand, the church is NOT asking EVERYONE to use it. They are asking the ward leaders to use it. It is the ward leaders who are struggling because the youth don't have access. This is not a case of a broken handcart. It is more like a case of a handcart that doesn't work exactly the way I may want it to work, but it works. There are ways for the youth secretaries to participate without a digital device. Those ways may not be the most convenient or the most efficient, but they will work in the interim until something better comes along.

But, hey, that's just my opinion and others are welcome to disagree with me. I do worry about the digital divide we are creating between those who have technology and those who do not (often through no fault of their own).

I think the design of the tool has been made with the intent to make it very easy for people to use all the way down the class/quorum/secretary level. All of the functionality is there except the access to the right people. I think if the programmers intended only an organizational presidency to access this, they wouldn't have bothered with adding it to Member Tools, etc. Our Bishop definitely doesn't want he or his counselors taking role in the Aaronic priesthood quorums. The quorum/yw class secretaries were already using a google doc to track attendance and removing that responsibility is not something he wants to do. Having them track it in a google doc that someone then turns around and enters into LCR/member tools app is redundant.

The amount of time we've talked about this in ward council, bishopric meeting, and even on my doorstep.... if you take that, multiply it by the # of wards asked to use the tool... sheesh, that's a lot of time people are debating how to do this. And ultimately it's not getting recorded because all people are doing is talking and asking why they can't have the teachers do it or the secretaries, etc. A simple access level change would get us so much further than we've gotten in the past 3 weeks. We'll get there, but it seems unnecessarily burdensome given the programming is done. Yeah, I get grouchy.

I do get your point about the digital divide and geographically that's going to vary a lot.

For what it's worth, I have found that taking attendance with Member Tools doesn't work for me. As a member of the EQ Presidency, I can report my own attendance, but if it do it in Member Tools, I still have to do it again in LCR. So even if the youth secretaries could do it in Member Tools, someone may still have to go in through LCR and monitor/fix missing information.

davesudweeks wrote:For what it's worth, I have found that taking attendance with Member Tools doesn't work for me. As a member of the EQ Presidency, I can report my own attendance, but if it do it in Member Tools, I still have to do it again in LCR. So even if the youth secretaries could do it in Member Tools, someone may still have to go in through LCR and monitor/fix missing information.

Tried today with a YW class secretary and she could not see anything in Member tools even after updating, logging out and back in, etc. She received an access denied trying to access LCR.

Looks like we'll continue our google spreadsheet that the youth secretaries update and then someone with access will have to enter it into LCR/member tools. Sure seems redundant. We are intentionally pushing responsibility to the youth so it's important they are involved in the process.

chriswoodut wrote:Tried today with a YW class secretary and she could not see anything in Member tools even after updating, logging out and back in, etc. She received an access denied trying to access LCR.

I believe YW class presidencies don't have access. It would appear that no one on this forum knows exactly why. The YW organization presidency (and YW secretary) have access to populate the information after the YW class secretaries report it to their adult leaders.