By Jay Speck, Solano County Superintendent of Schools
Special to Patch
As we approach the second half of the school year, some students are already heading toward academic trouble – they have missed too many days of school. Chronic absences often hinder academic performance at each subsequent grade level; yet close to 7.5 million students across our nation miss nearly a month of school every year.
via Op-Ed: Missing School Hurts Students, Must be Addressed by Community.
By Jay Speck, Solano County Superintendent of Schools
Special to Patch
As we approach the second half of the school year, some students are already heading toward academic trouble – they have missed too many days of school. Chronic absences often hinder academic performance at each subsequent grade level; yet close to 7.5 million students across our nation miss nearly a month of school every year.
Problems with absenteeism can start surprisingly early. National research shows that 1 in 10 kindergarten and first-grade students are chronically absent, meaning that they miss 10 percent of the school year, or roughly 18 days of instruction, due to excused and unexcused absences.
via Op-Ed: Missing School Hurts Students, Must be Addressed by Community.
Editorial: School attendance must be a communitywide commitment
www.thereporter.com
As Solano County public school students return to the classroom on Monday, they and their parents may notice new signs on hallway walls or handouts coming home, describing the importance of good attendance.
via Excellent editorial in Sunday’s The Reporter about local efforts to address chro….
As Solano County public school students return to the classroom on Monday, they and their parents may notice new signs on hallway walls or handouts coming home, describing the importance of good attendance.
The School Attendance: Every Minute Matters campaign launched by the Solano County Office of Education isn’t just targeting teenage truants or those with unexcused absences — although they need to hear the message, too.
This awareness effort is aimed at parents at the kindergarten and elementary school level, where attendance patterns are formed.
In the fall, our director Hedy Chang spoke at the Communities for Change conference in Houston, a gathering of like-minded groups who see data sharing as essential to making a difference in a community. Today, the folks at nFocus Solutions, one of the conference’s sponsors, are featuring an interview with Hedy on their blog.
Hedy talks about where chronic absence fits among broader educational reform efforts and why so many students miss so much school. Here are some excerpts from the question-and-answer section:
via Hedy Chang Explains the Who, What and Why of Chronic Absence.
Get a wake up call from your favorite celebrity! Get Schooled wants to help you get to school on-time and focused and we’ve asked some of our favorite friends to help. Check it out!
via Get a wake up call from your favorite celebrity! Get Schooled wants to help you….
Combating chronic absence among students will become a priority this school year, according to Solano County Superintendent of Schools Jay Speck.
He has joined a nationwide Call to Action in which he is “agreeing to raise public awareness, dig deeper into attendance data, and work with community partners to improve school attendance starting as soon as children enter school,” according to a release from the Solano County Office of Education this week.
via Chronic Absence Will Be a Priority, Says Solano Superindendent.
Several studies have documented how poor attendance correlates with lower standardized test scores. Now the people who bring you the National Assessment of Educational Progress have connected absences in the month before the national test with weaker performance.
Diving deeper into the data that NAEP provides, researchers found that nearly 20 percent of the eighth graders who scored at the basic level in reading on the 2011 test had missed three or more days in the previous month. For those who scored below basic, the figure was higher than 25 percent.
FAIRFIELD – Solano County Superintendent of Schools Jay Speck has joined a nationwide Call to Action for Superintendents to make chronic absenteeism a priority this school year, agreeing to raise public awareness, dig deeper into attendance data, and work with community partners to improve school attendance starting as soon as children enter school.
via “Although chronic absenteeism is often considered a high school problem, nationa….
FAIRFIELD – Solano County Superintendent of Schools Jay Speck has joined a nationwide Call to Action for Superintendents to make chronic absenteeism a priority this school year, agreeing to raise public awareness, dig deeper into attendance data, and work with community partners to improve school attendance starting as soon as children enter school.
via Solano County Superintendent pledges to make chronic absence a priority starting in the early grades.
In an effort to improve graduation rates, Solano County educators continue to call on students, parents and communities to boost school attendance by focusing on chronic absenteeism.
In October, educators signed on to a comprehensive effort, “School Attendance — Every Minute Matters: From Awareness to Action,” in hopes of stemming the problem. California has a graduation rate of 71 percent, ranking 42nd out of 50 states, based on the most recent data from the U.S. Department of Education.
Chronic absences occur when a student misses 10 percent or more of classroom instruction days, or about 18 days in a year, for any reason, including excused absences, noted Jay Speck, Solano County superintendent of schools.
Attendance Works, in collaboration with the Healthy Readers Team of the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading will host a webinar, Present and Engaged in the Early Grades: Improving Health to Increase School Attendance to discuss strategies for reducing absenteeism due to preventable health issues.
Jessica Tovar, Project Manager for the Long Beach Alliance for Children with Asthma, will describe how LBACA works with schools and community partners to reduce school absenteeism and hospitalizations due to asthma. In addition, Nurse practitioner Jill Kerr will describe her research demonstrating that outreach by nurses to parents of chronically absent students in the early grades can significantly improve school attendance.
via December 13 Webinar: Improving Health to Increase School Attendance.
Did you know that for every day of school missed, it takes three days to make up what was taught? Find out more about chronic absence on SCOE’s Every Minute Matters web page.
via Did you know that for every day of school missed, it takes three days to make up….
Solano County Office of Education’s Facebook Wall
Why is chronic absence so important? Research proves that students who are chronically absent in Kindergarten and 1st grade are far less likely to read proficiently by 3rd grade.
Read more about chronic absence on SCOE’s Every Minute Matters web page.
via Why is chronic absence so important? Research proves that students who are chron….
Columnist Ernest Kimme writes about the importance of addressing chronic absence in today’s edition of The Reporter.
via Columnist Ernest Kimme writes about the importance of addressing chronic absence….
The Reporter supports Every Minute Matters, a comprehensive effort to boost student attendance by addressing chronic absences in Solano County.
via The Reporter supports Every Minute Matters, a comprehensive effort to boost stud….
Our high school graduation rates in Vacaville Unified School District are abysmal.
Officially, most graduation rates are above 90 percent. Unofficially, if you compare the size of incoming freshman high school classes with the number of students who make it to their senior year, you’ll see that several hundred students are missing. This has been the pattern as long as I have been teaching.
Those missing students are more likely to end up in prison or on welfare. Without a high school diploma, they are unlikely to climb out of poverty.
In Los Angeles, a strategic plan to reduce chronic absence increased the number of students attending school regularly, led to partnerships with the broader community and saved the school district more than $1 million that would have been lost to student absenteeism. The work includes:
A new Ad Council campaign released today targets middle school chronic absenteeism with television and radio ads alerting parents how quickly school absences can lead to academic trouble and dropping out of high school. The public service announcements come as part of the Boost Up campaign, a partnership between the Ad Council and the U.S. Army that aims to increase graduation rates nationwide.
If we’re going to reduce chronic absence, we know we need to use every resource available to us. Among our best allies in this work are afterschool programs. Research shows again and again that school day attendance improves when students are engaged in the right kind of program after school, one that provides a connection to a caring adult, enriching activities and the academic support kids needs This came up again last week as we participated in a webinar and released an article we wrote, Building a Culture of Attendance: Schools and Afterschool Programs Together Can and Should Make a Difference!
The article explains why quality afterschool programs can have such a profound effect on student attendance: