“If you want the dough, you have to go!”

Why is attendance important? And why is it important for parents and/or guardians to encourage their children to attend school? The answer is quite simple: A teacher cannot teach and a student cannot learn if a student is not in class.

Students who attend classes with a minimum of absences are not only exposed to more learning opportunities and a higher level of achievement, but they also increase their potential earning power.
The more days a student attends school can also be an indicator of future work habits. Employers want employees to come to work regularly and bring with them the knowledge and skills necessary to
do the job.

Over the past seven years, FCSD1’s K-12 attendance rate (the percent of students in attendance in class, including those students with an excused absence or on a school-sponsored activity) has been better than the state average only three times. This makes FCSD1’s average attendance rate 94.17 percent, compared with the state average of 94.23 percent. In the fall of 2008-09, the district trailed the state average by 0.54 percent.

Students who do not attend classes are at a much higher risk to drop out of school at some point. For example, in the first semester of the 2008-09 school year, of the 234 K-12 students with less than an 88 percent  attendance rate, 113 left the district.

Attendance is critical for students in each grade, but especially so for high school freshmen. Consider this: nearly 90 percent of freshmen who miss less than a week of school per semester will graduate, regardless of their 8th grade test scores. And freshmen that miss more than two weeks of school will fail, on average, at least two classes, no matter whether they arrive at high school with top test scores or below-average scores. In fact, freshmen that arrive with high test scores but miss two weeks of school per semester are more likely to fail a course than freshmen with low test scores who miss just one week. Being in class is important.
  

Connecting attendance to the graduation rate and future success

The graduation rate in FCSD1 for the 2006-07 school year trailed the state average by 3.36 percent.
In that school year, our graduation rate was 76.13 percent.

Economically, high school dropouts on average earn $9,200 less per year than high school graduates. Dropouts are over three times more likely than college graduates to be unemployed and twice as likely than high school grads to slip into poverty from one year to the next. A dropout is more than 8 times as likely to be in jail or prison as a person with at least a high school diploma.

To help boost attendance and the graduation rate, and reduce the number of dropouts, FCSD1 employs a variety of interventions that begin with parent and/or guardian notifications. At all grade levels, letters are mailed to a student’s home when the number of absences reaches 5, 10, and more than 15 days away from school. At this point, the building principal will call the student’s home and the district’s truancy coordinator takes appropriate action, anything from home visits to morning wake-up calls.

To help a student with significant absences get back on track, FCSD1 offers make-up classes via tutoring
or time with a teacher during lunch at Lander Valley High School. At Pathfinder High School, the student may be placed in a computer-based class to make up lost work. A meeting of the BIT, or Building Intervention Team, can also be scheduled.

In the worst-case scenarios, when warranted, cases are filed with the Fremont County and
Prosecuting Attorney for educational neglect.

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LVHS Spanish class

Fourth Graders at
North Elementary

Instead of looking
“out the window,”
we need to look “in
the mirror” at what
we can do right now,
always with the
expectation of
making discernible
progress in the short
and the long term.
—Dufour, 2004