There has been a statewide decline in attendance rates, in part due to COVID-19 Superintendent Cheryl Jordan said. COVID-19 created a situation where people have forgotten the value of physically being in school because they became used to the online experience, she added. Many students have heard about the district wide goal of having 97% attendance this year, senior Muskan Gupta said. For high school students, these goals are mainly publicized in the emails sent out by administration, she added.
“For the most part, we have been hovering between 96 and 97 percent,” Jordan said. “There are some days where we have seen a drop and those days are right after a three-day weekend or right after a vacation. I think we can get” to the 97% goal, she said.
To promote attendance, Jordan pushes the idea of a “we” culture to help students feel seen on campus, she said. When students feel they are connected to each other and the staff, students will feel more comfortable coming to school, she added.
“How do we make sure kids feel that the learning matters, that the experiences that they have matter for their purpose?” Jordan said. “How do we make sure that kids feel that they are a part of what they are learning?”
The teachers in the district seem to be doing a good job in integrating student voices within their lessons, Jordan said. It is the shared responsibility between the student themselves, family,and staff to keep a student accountable for their attendance, Assistant Principal Casey McMurray said. “We all play a part; we all have certain levels of influence, and so it is a shared responsibility,” McMurray said. “I don’t think it’s any one person that’s responsible for a student’s attendance.”
Attendance plays a key role in having more options and opportunities later in life because, if students are not in school, they spend their time doing other things that could negatively impact their future, McMurray said. “If you miss school for even two days a month, the statistics show that you fall into a category of being at risk to not graduate on time,” McMurray said. The stress that students get from having multiple tests in one day could be a factor in why students will skip some periods during the day to get extra study time, Gupta said.
There are measures that the high school administration has taken to try and promote attendance, specifically within high school, she added. “To encourage attendance, they send out spam emails, but none of us really pay attention,” Gupta said.
There may be a small number of students who may not have the best education opportunities
because of unknown factors, and the administration needs to do whatever they can to intervene to change the trajectory of those individuals, McMurray said. “I think it’s a valid reason to take a mental health day off from school, but people take advantage of it to skip school for no reason,” Gupta said.
In the past two years, many people were on edge about every sniffle and every sneeze, Jordan said.
Now that COVID-19 has settled down a little bit, it is not as big of an issue, she added.
“We are stepping into the role where COVID-19 is not a pandemic but is endemic,” Jordan said.
In the same manner, as students taking advantage of mental health days to skip school for no
reason, many students have used COVID-19 or small illnesses to not come to school, Gupta said.
She believes that COVID-19 has made students lazier because it gave them an excuse to not be in
school, she added.“ “Students need to feel that their learning experiences and learning environment matter to them,” Jordan said. “They see a connection and their own purpose to what it is that they’re learning in school.”
The school board has taken many steps such as creating a “we” culture within the district this year to address the issue of students who chronically aren’t coming to school, Jordan said.
The district seems to be on track for the attendance goal this year, she added. “I don’t do my job to look at how good or bad we are compared to another school,” McMurray said. “I do it because we have students that need the support and we’re here to give it to them, whatever the statistics might be.”