Chronic absenteeism remains a concern for the Lexington R-V School District. The State defined benchmark for chronic absenteeism is missing more than 10% of the hours within the school year. The District had paused efforts to incentivize attendance during COVID, as instructed for safety. This year, buildings have implemented strategies and incentives to encourage students to be present to learn.
The state measure for attendance points on the APR (Annual Performance Report) is 90% of students in attendance 90% of the time. The District received 0/4 points for attendance on the 2023 APR. As of today, each building has the following percentage of students meeting the 90% requirement:
LBS - 84.3%
LMS - 69.92%
LHS - 72.87%
By State standards, an absence for any reason is counted as an absence. No distinction is made to determine if the absence was excused or unexcused. There is a distinction between a verified (documentation submitted from a doctor, court, etc.) and unverified absence. This documentation is taken into consideration when reporting chronic absenteeism to the District Social Worker, Juvenile Office, Children's Division, or Prosecuting Attorney for Truancy Court. However, this does not impact attendance hours reported to the state for each student.
Using an example of the state minimum 1044-hour calendar, to meet the 90% attendance requirement, a student must be in school 939.6 hours. This means that 104.4 hours, or 15.81 days (6.6 hours per day), could be missed and the state attendance requirement would still be met.
Life does happen, and being absent due to extenuating circumstances occurs. Unfortunately, we have many students checking in late, checking out early, and missing a significant amount of school time in addition to those instances. A few hours here and there add up. This directly impacts student learning and funding to support our students.
It is going to take all of us working together to support our students in creating good attendance habits. Commissioner Vandeven shared, in a previous news release, "Regular attendance is sometimes out of the student's own control but is a student success factor and a workforce readiness expectation."