School Attendance

by Education Blog

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Posted on September 18, 2017

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Let me begin by recognizing our high school students for their work for Homecoming.  It was great to see our young people taking leadership roles throughout the week.  Also, a thank you to the teachers and sponsors for their time and support of our students.

It is hard to believe that we have 20 school days until the first nine weeks is over.  I mentioned in a previous blog the new accountability report, or report card that will be released to measure school districts this year.  The indicators used to determine the report card outcomes have been revised, and new ones added.  One of the new indicators that is used to measure schools is chronic absenteeism.  Chronic absenteeism is defined as a student that misses 10% or more school days.  The school year is 175 days, so this would be not missing more than 17.5 days during the school year.  This indicator focuses on the issue of a single student missing multiple days rather than multiple students missing a single day. There are medically exceptions to this rule, and the State Department is continuing to work out the details on exactly how schools are to report this information, but needless to say attendance in school is important.  Here are just a couple of research points provided by the Oklahoma State Department of Education:

• Research shows that students who are chronically absent in sixth grade are much less likely to graduate high school on time, if at all (BERC, 2011).
• Also, chronic absence in kindergarten was associated with lower academic performance in first grade (Balfanz & Byrnes, 2012).

As we push towards the end of the first nine weeks, please remember the importance of attendance for your child's education.  

 

Sincerely,

Tim Argo

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