Wow, yea I could see how this could be overwhelming. Like Jeff we don't have special statuses for our youth or kids. We do have two difference campuses so we split those out.
The main statuses we use for our church attenders is Member which you have to be 16 to go through Membership, this is the only way you are given the status of Member is to go through our Membership class. Anybody else who attends our services even a first time visitor, we give them the status of attendee, we don't use the actual visitor status. I find that the more statuses that you implement in an effort to track an individuals status/involvement within the church simply causes way more work down the road.
The one exception we make when it comes to someone attending one of our weekend services is if they are visiting from out of state. In this case we give them the status of Misc.
I don't know what the size of your Youth Ministry is and what you average for attendance every week but quite honestly I think your best bet is to record their actual attendance. Mainly because it sounds like you want to track at a much deeper level then most churches are when it comes to the frequency in which youth are attend.
Is there a reason you are not using checkin, it doesn't have to be an elaborate setup, you could even use one or two laptops and have volunteers manually check people in vs. using scanners and barcodes. If you absolutely are not in a position to use the actual checkin system you can still track attendance without having to use the checkin program. You can setup your youth services as actual activities in F1 and then manually post attendance for the youth. This is why I asked about the number of youth that attend every week. Although the process in general of posting attendance is quite simple, it could obviously take some time if you are talking hundreds of youth every weekend.
If you are not familiar with the "post attendance" option it would require you to come up with some sort of process of obtaining a list of names each week for those youth who attended service. It could be as simple as passing around a bunch of clipboards and asking for the youth to sign the form. Second, you would have to have your service(s) setup as activities with room locations in F1. Once you have all the names collected there is a way to go in and post attendance for each youth for that specific service date and time. Once all this info is recorded you can run reports on it.
Outside of tracking the actual attendance I agree that the only other way to possibly do it would be to create some sort of attribute structure. You would create your attribute group and then create all the difference attendance scenarios as actual attributes which you can later report on. I would highly recommend that you move away from using the statuses as a way to identify the frequency in which a youth is attending, this is not what the statuses were created for.
Hope this helps.
Kim Ludwick
Database Manager
Champions Centre
"One Church, Two Locations"
Tacoma/Bellevue, WA