Reply to Pointless attendance reminders

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Another perspective- The impact of excessive absence can be the same whether excused or unexcused. For example, let’s say a student has a medical issue (mental or physical) come up and that starts to result in many excused absences.  This student is still missing valuable class time. If they are studious, they now are trying to makeup missed work and learning while trying to stay on top of new learning and work. If MCPS is made aware that something is going on, they can work with the family and school system to come up with a plan that may reduce the student’s burden.  For example, their teachers could ensure they get packets of the weeks work ahead of time.  They could schedule tutoring sessions.  They could change the students schedule for the short or long term so medical appointments could be more easily scheduled and  the student not have to miss class. Etc…

As someone also pointed out, some parents may not be aware that their kid is missing school days or particular parts of school days.

While the system isn’t perfect and can likely use tweaks,it’s an attempt to inform parents of an issue that impacts their kids learning and potential to do well while also reaching out to understand the potential cause of the absenteeism.

So while you can say my kid had the flu one week and the Covid the next but overall is fine and doing well, that same fact is not true for All.

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I agree with your point, but the trigger for the email/text (I received both) seems too low.  She missed three days (all excused) in a quarter.  That's pretty normal if a kid has COVID, flu, a bad virus -- pretty much anything.  Asking me if there's anything MCPS can do to get my kid to attend class more when she missed three days seems just totally pointless.  If you had a kid that was missing 15 days in a quarter, yeah, I can see where perhaps MCPS might be able to provide the family with some assistance either in attendance or in-home/virtual teaching.  But I also suspect that it's sort of an empty offer for assistance, because I don't think there is much that MCPS can provide to families that are struggling to get their kids to school.

I really don't mean to be critical of MCPS -- I'm actually a much bigger fan of the school system than most posters on this board.  But I am a big critic of their PR/Comms department, which seems to just entirely make a lot of work for themselves sending out messages that are pointless and not useful to anyone.  Whatever they are paying those people, I'd prefer they fire them, and use the money to pay teachers.

I do think that the alerts telling you your child was not in school are helpful -- even though they are wrong at least 50% of the time, at least it's a way to alert parents that there may be a ditching problem that they don't know about (or possibly that they forgot to send in the note for illness). The messages I was complaining about are NOT the "your child was absent for one or more periods today" messages, but rather the "Larla has missed 3 days of school this quarter.  This includes both excused and unexcused absences. How can we help?"  (the message then goes on to lecture me about how all absences, even for illness, mean missed instructional time....).  
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