Attendance is important. If either students or teachers are not at school, learning is significantly impacted. Every school day missed is a missed opportunity for student learning. Chronic absenteeism puts a student academically at risk of failure and falling behind their peers. Therefore, it is important that students and teachers are at school for every minute possible of the school year to maximize learning.
The legislature recently changed the long standing requirements of how many days and how long each school day must be within a school year. Schools are now required to have a minimum of 75,600 minutes of instruction each school year. Knowing the importance of every minute of the 75,600 minutes, we have been working diligently to improve our attendance of both students and teachers. Our administrators attended the E3 Alliance’s Attendance Summit this summer and created both campus and district plans to help improve attendance. Campuses are working closely with parents.
Our student attendance rate averaged 94.60% for last school year. This year, our student attendance is averaging 96.45%. This increase of 1.85 percentage points is significant. This means that there are an additional 20 students present in school each day as compared to last year. This equates to 20 more students receiving an additional 75,600 minutes of instruction. Furthermore, this means that an additional 1.5 million minutes of instruction are being received by individual students in the district.
We are very appreciative of the extra efforts of our parents this year to get their students to school every day. At our last home football game this Friday night, our ECC/Elementary is celebrating 232 students that have maintained perfect attendance this year to date. The 232 students have been given free admission to the game and will be leading our Natalia Mustangs out of the tunnel to begin the game.