The attendance policy for the Shawano School District, up until this point, had missing any part of the school day count as a full-day absence.
The Shawano School Board approved changes to the policy Aug. 24 that would allow for partial-day absences. The system is more in line with policies from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, according to Deanna Arrowood, associate principal at Shawano Community High School. Arrowood’s primary responsibilities include keeping track of students’ attendance, although she noted the new policy is still fairly conservative.
Under DPI’s system, students who are absent for less than one-third of the day would count as present for the entire day, while students absent for one-third to two-thirds of the day would be counted as absent for a half-day. If a student is present for less than one-third of the day, it would count as a full day’s absence.
Shawano’s new system would allow high school and middle school students to miss up to two class periods out of the 10-period schedule, according to Arrowood. Additional missed classes would align more with state reporting thresholds.
“We’re looking at better ways of doing this and communicating better on how it’s reported to the state,” Arrowood said.
At the elementary schools, attendance is recorded four times per day, so students would be able to miss one part of the day and still be counted as fully present at the school for the day, according to Arrowood.
Working with the previous system, some high school students would schedule appointments to coincide with their study halls. However, if they were not present at the study hall, they would be considered absent for the full day, Arrowood said.
Although the policy is changing, Arrowood noted that the schools will continue monitoring tardiness, frequent part-day absences, class period attendance patterns, habitual truancy and chronic absenteeism. She said students with concerning attendance behaviors would continue to receive interventions.
“We’re being very careful in looking at our chronic absenteeism rate, so I want to make sure that we stay below what the state looks at, but I’m asking that we change the wording we have for part of a school day,” Arrowood said. “It is wordy and vague, and I don’t know if the state is going to change its percentages.”
She added that if those percentages change, the district could change its policy again to remain below the percentages. This is to stress the importance of attendance but not penalize students for missing an hour of school.
Tardiness policies would remain the same, according to Arrowood, with records marked with a T for being less than five minutes late and a M for 5-30 minutes late. After that, it would count as an unexcused absence from the class.
Arrowood told the board she’s working on updating the attendance policy to lay out what the district will do once students reach a certain number of unexcused absences.
Superintendent Kurt Krizan said the old policy has inflated the schools’ habitual truancy numbers. The district has sent letters to parents at five, 10 and 15 days of absences.
Arrowood said if the new policy had been in place last year, it would have meant 100 fewer students would have parents notified that they’d exceeded 10 absences.
“That’s 100 families. Think about how many letters that is,” Arrowood said. “Then we have really angry parents.”
lpulaski@newmedia-wi.com
