D21 tackles school attendance

In aggregate, the district has a 93.6 percent attendance rate, a figure the district has worked hard to improve, said district Superintendent Candy Armstrong. “We’re doing a good job, much better than what has happened in the past, but we have to stay on it,” she said. “We’re trying to develop a culture of attendance.”

As an indicator of how the district has improved attendance, the rate at the high school, which now stands at 92.3 percent, stood at just 85.7 percent in the 2011-12 school year.

In the first quarter of this school year, Col. Wright Elementary was exceeding that 94 percent standard in all grades but kindergarten.

Chenowith Elementary met that standard in only two grades, and all other grades from sixth through 12th were below, the worst being high school seniors at 88 percent attendance.

All but the senior class are at or above 91 percent, though.

“Does the data support that we have something terrible going on? Not really,” Armstrong said. But “it’s a long game and it will take a few years to

reflect in graduation rates,” she said.

The school district has an on-time graduation rate hovering around 60 percent. The district stresses to parents the importance of school attendance, and that can be a hard sell sometimes.

“We get a lot of pushback at kindergarten and the earlier ages. Parents just don’t see why their kids should be at school,” Armstrong said.

“It’s tough to get them where they need to be academically if they’re not exposed to the curriculum,” Armstrong said.

Some parents plan to have their child miss a day of school a week every week, she added. The school asks if the parent is willing to “rethink that,” she said.

Educators are focusing particularly on the kindergarten and early years because “that’s where the habits are formed. What happens in the early years, it’s dependent on the parents and parents have the ability to form good habits,” Armstrong said.

But from about the seventh grade on, “it’s really about the child’s choice,” she said.

A few years ago, a group of local officials from a variety of agencies began meeting to address truancy. They met monthly for a time, working to find and understand effective anti-truancy tools.

Those tools included emphasizing the importance of attending school, and then backing that up with steps like having police deliver truancy letters to parents, followed by home visits and possibly referring families to child services.

In the most serious cases, a community review board convened to talk to parents and solutions were sought to help get their kids get to school.

Sometimes, the solution was as simple as getting an alarm clock, said Christa Rude, who helped form the program with the now-disbanded Wasco County Commission on Children and Families.

The focus of the group was providing positive, caring support and believing all kids deserved to be, and can be, successful, Rude explained.

Attendance monitoring requires an attentive school staff. Schools understand that kids get sick and will miss some school occasionally, but “When kids are absent any length of time we look at what’s going on,” Armstrong said.

They’ll check for things such as whether the child is being bullied at school or is having troubles at home, she said.

Chenowith Elementary has the biggest challenges with attendance, but Principal Anne Schull is diligent in her efforts to learn why kids are missing school. She’s done home visits, even getting bitten by a dog, Armstrong said.

“I’m telling you, Anne will go to your work if you don’t answer as a parent on the phone,” Armstrong said.

Attendance isn’t the only factor affecting learning. Teachers also have problems with kids arriving late or leaving early.

Kirky Stutzman teaches fifth grade at Chenowith and has been teaching here since 1995.

She said, “My classrooms have never been this way. I’ve never had the number of students that are tardy or leave school early.”

Kassee Lynch, who also teaches at Chenowith, said some parents pick their kids up regularly as much as 30 minutes early “to beat the rush in the parking lot.”

A student who misses classroom work becomes less engaged with school, said Lynch and Stutzman.

School these days is “very intense,” and covers a lot of material, Stutzman said. “When that student has missed that instruction, it builds day to day,” she said. To catch up, the student needs to miss things like PE or music or library time.

“I have one student who probably the first quarter was there a total of 16 days. So you talk about a student like that you’re talking about a student who had no basis, when they walk in.

“There’s no connection. So they don’t have any buy-in. Behavior becomes an issue. There’s a lot of things that start to disintegrate and break down.”

It plays into her time as well, as she figures out how to teach the student who is lagging behind. “You’re not available to help other kids that are moving forward. That’s where the problems start occurring and it can be hard to manage.”

If students do miss school, it’s important that parents pick up their homework, “but that doesn’t happen too often,” Stutzman said.

She said only two of her students are chronically absent, one severely. “And we’re working on it, doing everything.”

Lynch said, “I think the biggest thing, it’s when kids are absent from school it’s harder for them to make sense of the content that’s being taught and there’s a disconnect between learning, their peers and I guess school in general. Yeah, it’s important for kids to be at school, to be at school on time and not to be picked up early.”