In response to the growing number of students who are showing up to class late, LSHS has made significant changes to its policy. A major one is giving students lunch detention, which inflicts mixed emotions among the students, teachers and parents.
“I think a lot of students just get pissed off. They got lunch detention and just keep doing the same thing,” junior Colten Fink said.
Administrators are aiming for this policy to encourage the students to get to class on time. They hope that by enforcing this policy or giving them a warning the first time, it will change their habits. Sometimes it can be a struggle for students to fix their attendance, but the goal is that by enforcing this policy, getting to school on time will become a normal routine.
“There is some improvement, yes, but I actually see more improvement after my first meeting, where I give them the warning, and we talk about ways to improve their attendance,” Attendance Paraeducator Angela Cardwell said.
“Honestly, yes, it does reduce tardies because I got annoyed of getting called up to the third floor. Because of this, I stopped being late,” senior Emmanuel Holmes.
The LSHS Student Handbook’s attendance section stresses the importance of showing up to class on time. It helps build a strong path to graduating on time and creating good and healthy habits. If a student is tardy or absent, they have 72 hours to have their parent/guardian contact the school to get it excused.
The school watches patterns of students’ tardiness, even excused ones, to see if there’s an excessive amount of absences.
The overall goal of the LSHS school policy is to make sure students have the support they need, reduce unnecessary tardies and ensure everyone is on a path to success in school.
From gathering other information from Attendance Works, they clearly stated that many other schools in America are facing the same issue. Every school is suffering from its attendance crisis. Major schools have faced 20% or higher levels of chronic absences.
Chronic absenteeism makes it harder for teachers to teach and to develop classroom norms, because they have to wait for those absent students to catch up.
Students still have to complete all the missing work from the time they were absent. By doing this, students feel anxious and more stressed than they were before, which makes them not want to come to school anymore.
If absences start to get too bad, they have to involve the court, but schools use this as a last resort. Once schools involve the court, staff start to feel as if they do not help students enough to make a difference.
The pandemic made a massive impact on attendance, making this issue worse than it was.
Teachers are putting in more effort each day to encourage their students to go to school.
Every day counts: Make sure you’re there!
