A Few Simple Things: Attendance

Attendance, cell phones, dress code, language, and punctuality.  These are all things, simple things, one would like to believe could be easily managed by a public school system.  Yet, each of these simple things are now handled in such a way (in my school system anyway) as to be a detriment to the everyday learning environment.  These are basic needs a student must command to hold a job after high school.  Yet, we as an educational system do not enforce any of these basic needs so as to demonstrate their importance to our students.  Is it really a surprise to find we struggle in larger educational areas as well?  We will get to those larger areas in later posts. 
     Attendance.  Seems simple enough on its own.  If a students is absent from school they do not learn the necessary information.  If someone is repeatedly absent from work they no longer have a job.  I would think it a reasonably good idea to enforce a county public school system’s attendance policy for both learning and real-life purposes.  Enforcing the attendance policy would teach the student the importance of being at school on an everyday basis.  Enforcement of the attendance policy also holds students accountable to be where they are supposed to be when they are supposed to be there, just as will be required when they have a job.
     Instead, the county in which I currently teach, we wait until the student misses their 16th day before we even get involved.  Even then our involvement is not to hold the student accountable to our policy, but to help the students find a way to get around our own system.  We use waivers – which simply means we try to excuse as many of the absences as possible so the student in turn has more days they can miss.  When the student subsequently misses the new days we have provided them with we finally really crack down on them.  Not really, but it sounded better than the truth which is that we have them sign a contract saying they will not miss anymore days that are not absolutely necessary and excused.  
     So, how exactly have we helped these students?  We have taught them not to worry about rules or policy.  We have taught them that it is ok to not be dependable or accountable.  We have taught them that when they get a job they can really just ignore when they are scheduled to work, and should show up only when they truly feel like working.  I do not personally know of a job where you can miss over 20 scheduled days in a seven month time period and remain employed.  So, in the end we taught these students how to fail at sustaining themselves after leaving high school.
     In some ways we worry so much about what our students are and are not learning in the classroom, but we do nothing to promote the same students showing up and paying attention during class.  There are issues in the classrooms as well, and I am sure several blogs will be spent on those issues in the near future, but part of the education we provided our students has to include basic life skills necessary to be successful in school and after school.  If we do not hold our students accountable they will never understand the reprecussions of their decisions.