Let me see if I understand. You want an item, perhaps called "Attendance" to show within a topic with a checkbox that the students cannot check, but that they see.
I don't do this, but as an idea that might work, you might try using a quiz activity with Activity Completion set to "...show when a grade is complete" but set this up so that the students can't (or don't really) take it. Make the quiz worth 0 points (since you don't want it to contribute to their overall grade. Then, you can manually grade this. If I was doing this, I would import attendance information to grade it.
I don't do this, but as an idea that might work, you might try using a quiz activity with Activity Completion set to "...show when a grade is complete" but set this up so that the students can't (or don't really) take it. Make the quiz worth 0 points (since you don't want it to contribute to their overall grade. Then, you can manually grade this. If I was doing this, I would import attendance information to grade it.