After the remodeling of Lake Stevens High school, the district decided to add a fence around the school. This was to keep unwanted people out and to keep our students inside campus where they are safe. But students still decide to leave the gates even when they aren’t supposed to. They leave and skip class or go to their cars when they aren’t supposed to, and they break school policy.
When kids end up skipping class and leaving campus, they also affect their grades the majority of the time. Teachers have seen and it has been studied that when kids are skipping their grades tend to drop.
“Skipping classes with any sort of regularity has a direct correlation with lower grades,” Joel Kesler, a history teacher at LSHS said.
Kesler said he has seen this correlation in his classes and knows it also happens in other classes.
Kesler thinks that kids may skip classes due to apathy, feeling enabled by the school and district because there aren’t consequences for when students skip school. It is also really easy to get credits back through credit retrieval.
“It’s frustrating as a teacher,” Kesler said.
He believes students shouldn’t always be punished. He believes the first step should be to find out the students’ motives of leaving and figure out how to help students individually.
Michaela Clark, who is a math teacher here, said there are numerous ways to prevent kids from leaving, one of which includes posting an adult at every exit. Clark also thinks that teachers can try to make school more interesting so that kids enjoy being there. But she thinks that if students decide to skip there should be some form of punishment for these students.
“They could hate a teacher, they could hate a subject, they could have something going on in their family, there’s a lot of things that motivate them,” Clark said.
She sees the correlation when students frequently skip, but if it’s once in a while she says it doesn’t really affect them in the classroom for it is easy to get caught back up.
