Purpose: The purpose of the School Absentee Surveillance System (SASS) is to monitor school absences and analyze them to determine if they are abnormal and generate warning based on the results. Tool Description: The SASS tool was developed by the Preparedness, Emergency Response, and Recovery Consortiums (PERRC) UCLA branch as a way of tracking school absences at the district level. The system processes, analyzes, and displays data for each district on a daily basis. In addition, the SASS tool has the capacity to generate a wide range of absentee warnings based on a combination of complex rules and results. Who should use it?: SASS is intended for use by local health departments and school districts. Logistically speaking, SASS is very efficient because it requires very few resources as only computer systems in both the school and the local health department are needed. That being said, for SASS to work at full capacity, only a member of the IT staff and an epidemiologist are necessary. Benefits: By the use of this system an infectious disease outbreak could be detected days before other surveillance systems (i.e. hospital flu admissions, hospital based syndromic surveillance systems, sentinel Ill sites). It can empower local health departments to respond sooner which helps reduce both the length and severity of an outbreak.