Students who miss a lot of school are probably students who aren’t doing very well academically. Students who are frequently not in class get behind and don’t learn as much as they could or should.
It’s not a perfect correlation, at least not when chronic absenteeism rates are compared to Mississippi’s accountability grades. The former Leflore County School District, for example, has had admirably low absentee rates, even below the state average. Yet you can’t really tell it by the accountability grades in a district that would have been rated F this year if it had not been merged with the Greenwood School District.
Nevertheless, there are some patterns that do track pretty closely. Absentee rates rise steadily starting in junior high, as the Mississippi Department of Education emphasized last week when it released the latest figures on students who miss 10% or more of the school year. That’s also when the material being taught gets tougher, when the number of dropouts rises and when test scores generally go down.
The Mississippi schools with the highest absentee rates are all high schools, with anywhere from 40% to 60% of their students missing at least 18 school days a year. Greenwood High School is among them. That’s troubling.
Even if a student can miss a lot of school and still do well enough to graduate, it’s creating a bad habit of undependability. That, in turn, could hurt that student’s future job prospects and earnings potential.
During the month of October, many of our local schools are doing a great job to promote attending school each day. There are rewards for students that receive perfect attendance all month.
Hopefully, these efforts will cause our students — along with parents and guardians — to develop habits of making sure they stay in school.
