Unexcused absence

[Anonymous]

Helpful thanks. I’ll send an email but won’t stress beyond that. I am glad the school lets me know so I can at least check-in.

Our school (or maybe MCPS) has a strict policy that for athletes any absence on a game day, whether excused or not, that wasn’t pre-approved by the AD sends you to the bench for the game. One of these happened to our DD on a game day but the AD and coach talked to her about it and after they had compelling evidence she had in fact attended class they let her play. I was thankful for their reasonableness but it did make me think this was not the first time they had this kind of an inaccurate absence issue.

[Anonymous]

I don’t think anyone is enforcing this policy for individual classes. We’ve had 19 days of school, but I have a student with 11 absences already! I’ve done everything I can do as a teacher to notify the parents and support this student. The counselor and admin have done nothing. FWIW, the truant is a wealthy White non-disabled student in a two parent household.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Helpful thanks. I’ll send an email but won’t stress beyond that. I am glad the school lets me know so I can at least check-in.

Our school (or maybe MCPS) has a strict policy that for athletes any absence on a game day, whether excused or not, that wasn’t pre-approved by the AD sends you to the bench for the game. One of these happened to our DD on a game day but the AD and coach talked to her about it and after they had compelling evidence she had in fact attended class they let her play. I was thankful for their reasonableness but it did make me think this was not the first time they had this kind of an inaccurate absence issue.

Happened to DD too. I think a lot of teachers take attendance early so if you're even a few minutes late they mark your child absent and they are really busy so they forget to correct and the attendance secretaries at some school can be grumpy and unhelpful.

[Anonymous]

I've never fixed this in the past, but this year our high school claims that they are taking absences seriously. I have no idea what that means, but given that the school is saying there is a change in attitude toward them (and they are citing a district wide emphasis on reining in chronic absences) I think I would email the attendance secretary or similar with a list of the ones so far.