Anonymous wrote:You don’t know if they were skipping. Maybe they were seniors with late arrival.
I work in a different school and nothing happens. I mark them absent and go about my day. I don’t bother with referrals or contacting home anymore. I could spend all day going back through to see if Jack was absent in my class but present in his other classes and trying to determined if he skipped. No one has time for that. So I enter in attendance and go on teaching. With around 150 students, that’s about all I can do.
As for turning in work, half of the time the unexcused absences are changed later to excused because the parents forgot to call in the sick absence. So I am not going back to check that either and let them make up assignments.
+1. It's not my job to chase down the students who are skipping. Admin is supposed to deal with it but they usually don't. The kids who occasionally miss class for a legitimate reason such as illness usually make up the work. The ones who regularly skip don't. I enter a 0 and focus on the kids who want to learn.
That said, there are a lot of reasons high schoolers might be outside during the school day as others have said.