Attendance Is Important To Achieve Academic Success
May 5, 2008 - Wake County educators are working to boost academic success by focusing on attendance.
State law G.S. 115C-378 and Wake County Board of Education Policy 6000 require that students attend school. WCPSS Chief Academic Officer Donna Hargens says the expectation of principals, teachers and parents should be that students are in school.
Being in school is importantListen to Dr. Hargens talk about the importance of attendance |
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CHARTS LAW AND POLICY G.S. 115C-378 |
“Being in school is important,” said Dr. Hargens. “There are 180 days that you have to deliver the Standard Course of Study and each one of those 180 days is important.”
In class, topics are covered and objectives are mastered. Hargens says students need to be in class for the learning experience.
“Every time you are not in class, you have a gap in learning,” said Hargens. “A gap in learning puts a student at a disadvantage to learn the next topic in class, especially in a sequential class.”
Students agree
“Sometimes it can’t be helped,” said a senior who has missed 12 days in the first three quarters of school. “Sometimes you are just sick; sometimes family issues come up; sometimes your car breaks down.”
A junior who has missed eight days of school and has an after-school job says it’s difficult to catch up with schoolwork after an absence.
“It’s real complicated because usually you get a stack about this big of work and little time to do it and you really don’t understand it,” he said. “You have to work on it on your own.”
A junior who has missed 12 days because of illness says her parents are helpful and her teachers are understanding, but it’s really stressful to complete missed schoolwork and catch up with the rest of the class.
“Some teachers are good at helping you catch up,” she said. “Some just let you do it on your own.”
A senior who has missed weeks of class with a chronic illness said she planned ahead when she was aware she may be out and worked with friends to get class notes.
“My advice is try not to miss school if you can help it,” she said. “If I could help it, I wouldn’t miss as many days because then I wouldn’t be as far behind. Catching up is hard.”
Teachers and administrators agree
Anne Miller, a teacher at Southeast Raleigh High School, knows the four students and the difficulties they face.
“I really feel for them because they keep soldiering on and they’re usually pretty good about advocating for themselves,” said Miller. “But it does take its toll and they don’t get the same experience when they aren’t there to participate in class. They just don’t.”
Miller has a weekly agenda showing what will be covered in class. She uses the agenda, assigned activities and pairs students who’ve missed classes with students who mastered the work they missed. Other teachers provide readings and online material. Miller says it’s important for students to take advantage of the time teachers offer, especially one-on-one time, to master concepts they missed when absent.
“When they’ve missed a couple of days or a week and return to class, I notice that sometimes they look lost,” said Miller. “Even if you give students a packet of work, they don’t have the context. That’s what a real live person delivers and they don’t get that unless they go for the extra help.”
A school system review of attendance and success on high school End-of-Course exams shows a decline in the percentage of students who score at or above grade level on EOCs as students miss more days of class. 81 percent of ninth graders who missed five days or less of class tested at or above grade level on the EOC for Civics and Economics. Fewer than half of the students who missed more than 10 days reached grade level. When ninth graders taking Biology missed five days or fewer, 94 percent tested at grade level or above. Just 45 percent reached grade level after missing 16 days or more. The trend is true for other exams and for other grade levels.
WCPSS Middle School Language Arts administrator Crystal Reardon says absenteeism means students miss valuable classroom instruction and peer interaction.
“Students who are frequently absent are disconnected from school and lack relationships with teachers and other adults at their school,” said Reardon. “Chronic absenteeism can be a predictor of undesirable behaviors and may lead to students dropping out of school.”
Sanderson High principal Cathy Moore says research consistently shows that students who are not academically successful demonstrate a higher rate of absenteeism.
“If you are not in school, you miss the instruction,” said Moore. “You get behind, come back and try to catch up, while not being able to focus on the new material. You can get further behind. It can be really hard to catch up.”
Moore says student absences make it difficult for teachers. When two or three students miss two or three days of school, teachers may have to organize six to nine packets of make up instruction. At that level, according to the principal, make up work can become overwhelming for the teacher.
Students require time for learning
Dr. Hargens says work is underway to provide materials to teachers for absent students.
“What we are trying to do at the Central Services level is to provide resources that are aligned with the objectives in the Standard Course of Study that students can use and parents can use to help fill those gaps in learning because every teacher can’t possibly be duplicating effort to create activities around those learning objectives,” said Hargens. “No matter what resource we provide, it still doesn’t take the place of the teacher in the classroom and the student engaged in learning in the classroom.”
Students need that time in the classroom with the teacher to learn the objectives set down by the state that they build on each year working toward high school graduation.
“The issue is not absenteeism; the issue is learning,” said Hargens. “It's common sense to think that if you are in school, you are going to be learning more. So if you think of a K-12 experience where you’ve had absences, gaps in learning accumulate over time so in order to be able to graduate on time prepared for the future you can’t accumulate gaps in learning. You need to be able to read well and you need to have mastered the objectives that lead to the other objectives in the standard course of study K-12. So the issue isn’t absenteeism, the issue is learning.”
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