DCPS employee came to my door asking about our boy

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:Quick check for the future: will this become a bogus DCPS absenteeism excuse at some point? “It turns out some high schoolers were enrolled at their local HS and had never attended, pushing attendance rates down. It turns out they were attending St. Albans all along!!!”

Attendance is only counted for kids who are enrolled. Enrollment verification is supposed to be done every year AND it is audited. The audit sometimes only looks at a sampling of records. It’s an even bigger issue if the schools are claiming enrollment for kids who aren’t there. The schools get funding based on enrollment.

Wilson does this. They make it impossible to unenroll your child even though you never enrolled them! I STILL get calls randomly about my child (who is a Jr.) missing class. Not everyday or every period but on a regular basis.

In addition Hardy hasn't sent over his file. 3 years and counting.....

Not surprising. All Deal and Hardy kids are automatically 'enrolled' at Wilson, even if you don't 'register' your child. The enrollment at Wilson always shows a huge drop from 9th to 10th. I'm assuming it is mostly all the kids who never registered because they went to a non-DCPS school. Those who register at a different DCPS are fixed. The rest have to be tracked down and manually corrected if they can find the kid somewhere.

Wow. After I read your post, I went to the OSSE enrollment audit to see what it said.

For the Wilson class of 2017 over the years it says there were:

9th graders - 559 (2013-14)
10th - 416 (2014-15)
11th - 392 (2015-16)
12th - 378 (2016-17)

So what used to happen at Wilson on count day? At my kids charter (middle and high school) the kids were physically counted and that's the number submitted to OSSE? Did Wilson's budget numbers include these potential phantom students?

Those aren't phantom students.

In DCPS, students can only be held back in certain grades. Ninth grade is one of them. Roughly half of the ninth graders are held back at Wilson each year. So they have roughly 400 first-year 9th graders and 200 second-year ninth graders and then about 400 in each of the other classes.

Count day seems to be one of the few things in DCPS that's on the up-and-up. I remember when it wasn't but they've straightened it out in recent years.

I hope this is so. If not, then there is enrollment fraud to the tune of at least a couple of million annually by counting and funding kids who were auto enrolled but never attended. Wonder if we’ll see the FBI over at Wilson?

No, count day would prevent that. The kids aren't actually there so they can't be counted -- it is a literal butts in seat count. But the record keeping then has to be updated to show where they are.

[Anonymous]

Actually OSSE ended the ‘butts in seat’ count last fall (2017). All done via paperwork and electronic registration now.