Reply to Richard Montgomery High School teacher complains about chronic absenteeism

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[quote=Anonymous]Am I the only one that thinks too much attention is being paid to attendance?  The things that I care about most are the curricula shortcomings, the locked bathrooms and kids doing drugs/fighting in them, issues with teachers being able to timely grade and give feedback on work.  Attendance is way way down my list of things I care about.

Some kids will miss school because they are injured or sick—we don’t need constant texts telling us our kid was sick.  We know!  Some kids will ditch class when they know nothing is going on in class — teacher is shwong a movie they’ve already seen, post AP exams where teachers basically say we are done, half days where the teachers only have llle 15 minutes so it’s all pointless.  Some kids will skip school because they don’t want it be there — but it’s almost impossible to force a kid that doesn’t want to do something to do it.  Some of those kids are the ones smoking in the bathroom and fighting in the halls.  Are they getting any benefit out of being there?  Maybe if we could get them into a more intensive supportive environment that would be effective — but just telling those kids “go to school!” Does not make them learn.

I do wish they had more intensive support for kids who aren’t going to school because they are mired in family dysfunction, but would actually want to go.  Or the kids with chronic medical problems who would love to go to school but can’t make it regularly — I know a teen with that situation and MCPS basically made their life hell threatening to fail them out of school when they were killing themselves trying to keep up.  (There is a program for chronically medically ill but it’s really not good.). I feel like the McPS attendance efforts is all performative — they aren’t providing support for kids for whom it might make a difference and instead are just focusing on kids who either have a good reason to be absent, or who have zero interest in being in school.  I wish they’d take all their effort focused on atttendance and instead figure out a way to have a decent English curriculum in which they actually read books or figure out an intensive support system for the kids who are spending their day vaping instead of in class.  [/quote]

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