Come to school or suffer the consequences… which are… what, exactly?
Thanks to the legendarily poor attendance of some senioritis-afflicted members of last year’s graduating class, the administration started out this year with a much stricter attendance policy.
One to two unexcused absences are met with a warning but anything more than that leads to suspension from sports, extracurricular activities and other privileges. Two days of community service will regain a student’s privileges—as long as you only missed three days.
Four days of absences lead to a week of extracurricular suspension, and five lead to a month, with no potential for redemption through community service. Administrators even went so far as to assure seniors in a class meeting that those chronic skippers found on school property before 7 a.m. or after 2:30 p.m. would be prosecuted for trespassing.
Of course, the problem with this plan is that it’s far too strict to actually be enforced. The idea of actually taking skippers to court for being found at school is more than a little absurd and it is hard to picture truants actually doing meaningful community service and changing their ways.
The issue at this point is that this overly harsh policy is only in use on a case-by-case basis, meaning students are left with no real idea of what will happen if they miss school. We actually believe it’s for the best that students who miss five days of school aren’t being aggressively forced out of clubs and honor societies. But students do need a consistent policy, so punishments aren’t given out randomly and unreliably.
You don’t have to be a terrible student to rack up three days of unexcused absences; you just need a few bad days and a parent who forgets to call you in sick occasionally.
Students have a right to know what to actually expect when they find themselves in that situation. Most students aren’t even aware what counts as an absence (for the record, it only counts if you miss a full day). It’s also not clear how long these absences are counted for—do students get a clean slate every quarter? Every semester? Every high school career?
It is not fair to the students to leave them in the dark about the consequences of their attendance. Either there are consequences or there are no consequences but it doesn’t seem like too much to ask for that to be clearly defined so students know what’s coming when senioritis sets in.