School sends letter to parents of dead teenager complaining about her poor attendance
School sends letter to parents of dead teenager complaining about her poor attendance
The relevant paragraph is:
He said: "Unknown to the school, Megan's details had remained in a different part of the computer system and were called up when the school did a mail merge letter to the parents of all Year 11 students. The letter called up details of each student's attendance for the whole year to date and because Megan had been on roll in September, she was included.
As heartbreaking as this story is I can see how easily this could happen. Furthermore if a power user created their own query and did their own mail merge that makes this problem even easier to happen.
Mind you that bit about details in a different part of the computer system sounds like bad data normalizing.
I frequently have an Inactive Yes/No field on my tables as appropriate. And frequently it's somewhere near the end of the list of fields so it's easy to miss for someone not thinking about such.
In the Granite Fleet Manager on the equipment table I went a step further. I have a status field linked to a status table. This handles the situation where equipment is temporarily out of service due to lengthy maintenance/rebuilds, loaned out to other organizations or whatever the client desires. That status table has a Yes/No Inactive flag.