There is an attendance issue with upperclassmen and it is getting worse as the year goes on. Senior skip days are technically not allowed but the school is pretty lenient when there are one or two. Recently students have started taking advantage of this as more and more skip days are “scheduled” and administration does not approve. I’ve also noticed that classrooms tend to be more empty on test days which can’t be a coincidence.
I believe a big factor to the decreased attendance is that it is easy to keep up with work at home now that every student is issued a laptop. Students can learn and complete assignments that their teachers publish without having to be in the classroom. Another appeal to skipping class is if you miss a day with a test, you are then granted additional time to study and prepare.
Obviously students will miss school for good reasons and will be excused. If they happen to miss a test that day, teachers are only supposed to give them three days after they get back to make it up. Many teachers do not enforce this rule leading to more people skipping classes since they will not have any repercussions as far as testing.
In addition to people not coming to school in the first place, there seems to be a lack of enforcement of the late policy as well. The school rules state that you will be given lunch detention after three tardies and I have been late to well over three, yet never punished. This system goes two ways, it is up to the teacher to mark students as late and administration has to give punishments. If one part fails then it does not work. As someone who is chronically late, I do not mind this at all but I can see how this is a problem for the school.
Senioritis could also be the issue. There tends to be a lack of academic motivation after seniors get into college because they do not see any point in going to class once they have committed. Even though poor attendance after committing will not have any effect on whether or not a student can still go there, it is important to stay in the habit of going to school. It could carry over to college when students have that choice every day.
Our school has installed a hall sweep system to encourage students to get to class on time but that just leads to more people skipping class so they do not get swept. The punishments affect extracurricular activities such as sports, so students would rather just skip class than get caught in a sweep and miss practices and potentially games.
A lack of rule enforcement has led to a noticeable decrease in attendance because students can only benefit from not showing up to class. They do not suffer any consequences and are given additional time to complete tests and can still get their work done outside of class. Without any enforcement, classes are becoming more empty and our school needs to find a solution.
