Unassigned families in home teaching

[russellhltn]

So what does it take to get this feature added to MLS?

I'd send feedback though MLS.

[BelenG]

Yes. A family is assigned to a companionship. That companionship must be in a district, and that district must be assigned to a supervisor. When the districts are set up, the supervisor is either in the elders quorum or the high priests group.

Our ward has managed to get a district in the high priests group entitled (No Supervisor), but this appears to be an anomaly in MLS. I cannot create a similar district in the elders quorum, and if I do anything with the (No Supervisor) district, the names all dump by default to one of the other districts.

I think this is an error in the MLS code or database. We are reluctant to fix it, however, because it does come in so handy for tracking families assigned to a quorum but without specific home teachers.

We once used a companionship created from the young men who were currently serving ful time missions.
This companionship of course was in the Elder's Quorum.

[pantherjad-p40]

So it is possible that the stats could be EQ 90%, HP 90%, unassigned 2%, Ward 50%. But such a disparity between EQ/HP stats and total stats is only possible if there are a lot of unassigned families (an undesirable situation) who are not getting home taught (an unacceptable situation).

While it is seemingly undesirable and unacceptable that actual households of saints would not be assigned hometeachers and not hometaught, the reality is that there are lots of reasons that this takes place:

-Excessive time lag in the moving of records to and from units in cases where people have moved. Especially in the case of transient people, frequent movers, young people, missionaries in the field, etc.

-Families currently referred to as "Do Not Contacts," and other like people

-Wards where boundary changes and reorganizations have occurred.

-Single Adults who tend to often fit into the first bullet.

-Names on the ward list kept there because parents or relatives currently in the ward don't want their inactive loved ones' "records to be lost." (Whatever, that means!) I have encountered many parents whose adult children live elsewhere but for whatever reason the parents want their childrens' records left in the parent's current ward.

-And many other weird sorts of seemingly anomaly behavior regarding record keeping in our wards and branches.

I have seen in some wards (especially those in areas with small activity numbers) church records take literally years to correct because of all the leg work it can take to find out if a name on a list actually exists.

This is the reason these lists of unassigned families get so large and stay large and to assign dummy companionships would only shift the statistics/numbers so that you are telling the story that "hometeaching is a mess and is not getting done" rather than the story that "the ward records are a mess and their are a lot of people we don't know or people who don't want contact with the church (which is the more accurate story)." I really doubt many wards purposely put perfectly legitimate potential hometeachee households on the unassigned list to cook their numbers. It is almost always these crazy sort of reasons listed above that a relatively unknown household is slipping through the cracks rather than inadequacy on the part of priesthood leaders. Let the quorums celebrate success when they hometeach those households they have assigned rather than make them feel bad because the ward record is a mess or there are a bunch of households actively avoiding the church.

A good start to cleaning up these sorts of messes would be to incorporate a feature to break these unassigned families into quorum stewardships so that you can divy up the legwork of finding these families in an easily technologically supported way within MLS. That would prevent overlap between the HPG and EQ. It is simple to assign stewardship for an unknown family, look at age, demographics, family make-up, perhaps geo location, etc. Then you can say it makes sense for this quorum to find out about this family and assign stewarship, that way a list of 50 unassigned households becomes only 25 for a given quorum.

[lajackson]

-Names on the ward list kept there because parents or relatives currently in the ward don't want their inactive loved ones' "records to be lost." (Whatever, that means!) I have encountered many parents whose adult children live elsewhere but for whatever reason the parents want their childrens' records left in the parent's current ward.

We had a few of these. Our bishop worked with the families involved to convince them that their loved ones would receive no help at all unless the bishop where they lived had the record and knew they were there. Just a thought. I know it is a touchy issue for some.