Home Teaching - Who's doing it?

Discussions around using and interfacing with the Church MLS program.
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CMiller-p40
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Home Teaching - Who's doing it?

#1

Post by CMiller-p40 »

I have been asked by our Stake High Council to build a custom report out of MLS which shows the Home Teacher or Companionship and if they have been doing their home teaching. In looking at the Custom Report section, I see there may be a way to do this however, I wanted to get some feedback from this forum on this subject. I also noticed that the custom report may only be able to show the Companionship directly related to the families they are currently being Taught. So, if a companionship is given a new family which has not been taught in the past, it appears as though the current companionship is not doing their home teaching.

Thanks
rmrichesjr
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#2

Post by rmrichesjr »

In case you haven't seen what the existing reports give, in the existing report 'Enter Home Teaching Visits', the 'Visits' column gives the percentage of months in which the family was visited. That report is sorted and grouped by companionship currently assigned to home teach the families. You can filter that report to the whole ward, quorum or group, and district. One zero-build option would be to print that report for the high councilor and highlight that column. I don't recall whether any other home teaching reports can also give that information.

As you stated, the percentage available to any custom report, and in the report mentioned above, is based on the number of months the family was visited by someone, whether that was the current home teachers or any past home teachers. At least based on my understanding from the handbook chapter I have access to, a formal visit from any other priesthood holder would also be counted. As far as I am aware, MLS does not provide a way to distinguish who made the visit.

Did that help answer your question?
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mkmurray
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#3

Post by mkmurray »

CMiller wrote:I have been asked by our Stake High Council to build a custom report out of MLS which shows the Home Teacher or Companionship and if they have been doing their home teaching. In looking at the Custom Report section, I see there may be a way to do this however, I wanted to get some feedback from this forum on this subject. I also noticed that the custom report may only be able to show the Companionship directly related to the families they are currently being Taught. So, if a companionship is given a new family which has not been taught in the past, it appears as though the current companionship is not doing their home teaching.

Thanks
Your suspicions are correct, the short answer is that there is no real reliable way to produce the report that you seek because of the issues you brought up. If home teaching routes haven't changed significantly in a number of months, your suggested method would still give a little peak into the statistic you are looking for. To me though, that is not really reliable enough.

One suggestion I can provide is to flip around the criteria for the statistic you are looking for to be more inline with the way MLS Home Teaching is implemented in the software. That is to focus on families not being home taught, rather than focusing on home teachers not doing their home teaching. These two focuses are not directly correlated for the reasons and issues you've already brought up (companionship and/or assignment changes), but I think the change in focus may be helpful.

The focus on the well-being of the families themselves, rather than if Home Teachers are fulfilling an assignment, seems to be the focus of the reporting of MLS. Printing a report that shows families not being visited (a built-in MLS report) could be used to contact the currently assigned companionships in the setting of a Home Teaching Interview, urging them to visit and look after those families. At that point, it seems it really doesn't matter who was responsible for not visiting the families in the past, but that the current companionships (same or different) need to feel the urgency of visiting those families.

If a less than stellar companionship gets reassigned to a family that has previously been visited faithfully, then within 3 months time, that family will begin to show up on the families not being visited report. I'll admit it would be better if that situation could be anticipated via a report, but the point I'm trying to make is that the issue will come up within a relatively short time period.

The current built-in MLS Home Teaching reports do give you the entire picture if you understand the inner workings and assumptions the software are based on. It may be helpful to sit down with that High Councilor and explain how MLS works and what types of reporting it is able to provide. Then perhaps you could ask him how he would have you proceed with the newly discovered information.
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CMiller-p40
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#4

Post by CMiller-p40 »

Thanks for this info. It is pretty much as I felt to be true and do appreicate the feedback and additional insight. This is what I had hoped to gain.
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