Last year, high school seniors in Montgomery County Public Schools had a good thing going.
Due to a change in attendance policy, high school students no longer lost credit for missing or being late to class multiple times. It took students probably most of last fall’s first semester to figure out the beauty of this new rule. And then, like teens anywhere, they took advantage.
“Everybody started skipping,” said a senior at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring.
“Senioritis” went into overdrive, said Principal Alan Goodwin of Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda. Goodwin, who heads a professional learning community of MCPS high school principals, says administrators noticed an increase in attendance issues last spring. Once seniors started skipping, underclassmen tagged along.
“Every principal complained about the same thing,” he said.
Renay Johnson, who took over as principal at Blair in July, said a review of disciplinary data for the 2010-2011 school year showed that the number of students who were late or tardy to class was “significantly higher” than the previous year. “People did abuse it,” she said.
So the principals and MCPS staff got together and changed the policy. Students: Time to rethink that lunch run to Chipotle.
Now, students who miss class three times without an approved excuse will be warned of the possibility of failing and referred to a counselor. Five unlawful absences require submission of an appeal to make sure the absences were recorded correctly or an attendance intervention plan that provides a way for a student to make up missed work.
Students who don’t take either step will be in danger of failing.
And if students are late to class three times without approved excuses, they’ll be charged with one unlawful absence.
MCPS had dropped the loss of credit punishment for the 2010-2011 school year because too many “at-risk” students were not following through with the appeal process, whether they and their parents didn’t understand it or weren’t aware of it, Goodwin said.
Improved attendance software should help inform parents and students about the appeal process and make it easier to access it. “There’s a lot more involved in making sure that you understand the appeal process,” Goodwin said.
Parents will automatically receive warning letters or emails if students have three unlawful absences, and again for five absences, noting that the student will fail the class without an appeal or a completed intervention plan.
Teachers are embracing the revised policy, but—as expected—students are grumbling a bit, Goodwin says.
At Blair, Johnson says she sweetened the blow by giving students a “little freedom”—allowing students to use their cell phones during lunch, an idea that had been successfully piloted by several MCPS high schools last year.
“It’s give and take,” she said. “They like that.”
