School Attendance Programs

School attendance is one of the important hallmarks of a positively trained student. Having a good attendance rate, along with a few other factors, form the most vital indicators for a student’s academic success. It may seem a bit obvious but there is no chance that a student can learn something taught in school if he or she was not in attendance. The few students that have attended school classes regularly can have a chance of improving so that they can get a shot at having a successful academic life.

However, there do exist some exceptions that may be obvious to those who have been in academia for sometime and there are two extremes in this. In a sense, there can be some students that have been deemed to have been academically successful even though they are categorized as having a subpar attendance record.

On the other hand, there are some students that may not have any of those attendance issues but would struggle with academic work. But, the norm is that, a strong attendance record will usually correlate with a student’s academic success. Meanwhile, the poor attendance espoused by some students would correlates with academic failures. This article will study how important it is to implement school attendance programs to ensure that the students will get the best education.

Facts and Figures of School Attendance Programs

In order for us to have a better understanding about how important it is for students to have a good attendance rate, and how this influences how a student does in school, we first must have a collective definition on what exactly is a satisfactory or what is a poor attendance. Research, usually funded through a non-profit organization which aims to improve school attendance, have given categories of school attendance rates and divided them into three specific categories. There are students which have been deemed to have 9 or a lesser number of absences and they are considered to be satisfactory. While the students that have a number of 10 to 17 absences will be considered as exhibiting some of the warning signs or the tendency to potentially have attendance issues one day. And finally, the students which has 18 or a greater number of absences will be at a target list and will be treated as already having chronic attendance issues. The study done on this research were come up with using the numbers which were the result of a traditional school calendar which has 180 days.

Effects of Absenteeism

The educators and schools staff will have to agree that there will always be students that will have a need to stay at school classes for the majority of the school year and they also happen to be the ones that, unfortunately, are seldom there. It has been proven that an unsatisfactory attendance rate can produce a huge gap in learning. Should there be students that have to complete the make-up work, there is a big chance that they will most likely be the ones that will not be able to learn and keep the information in their memories as well as if they were present in class.

When a student has to do a lot of make-up work, he can be confronted with pile up that may be too stacking up too quickly. When a student goes back to school returning from a long hiatus, he or she may not have the capacity to finish up on his or her make-up work, and he or she will also have difficulty in having to face the regular classroom tasks like group work or assignments. These students will, more often than not, decide to power through or simply ignore the make-up classes completely so as they are able to keep up with their peers in the class. By doing this however, will naturally create gap in learning and, worse of all, cause their grades to plummet. When this extends to longer periods, the learning gap will only get wider up to a point when it may no longer be possible for them to catch up without staying back a year.

The number of school classes missed can easily pile up. These students who come to school at the earlier days of education and skip on 10 school days per year on average up to the time that they graduate in high school can miss up to 140  school days. The definition explained above would not make them regard them having poor attendance. In fact, the categorization would imply that the student does not have a problem in attendance at all. But, when we take a look at it altogether from a larger viewpoint, the same student will actually have missed nearly a whole year of schooling when the days are added up together. And now when you compare this student to a different student who has an issue in attendance and has missed 25 days on average throughout an entire year you would see that the student actually has a chronic attendance issue and have missed 365  school days or at least two whole years of schooling. It is of little wonder that the students who have these attendance issues will almost always be further behind in terms of academics compared to their peers who have a satisfactory attendance record.

How School Attendance Programs Can Help

School attendance programs can help in improving school attendance even though it may seem quite a difficult mission. Most schools will often have quite a little control over this area. And most will have to put the responsibility on the students’ guardians or parents, especially with the younger students. The parents of these students may simply not have the time to try to understand how crucial attendance is to the development of their child. They may not be able to realize quickly enough how missing just one day or one week of school can pile up to unmanageable lengths. Additionally, the parents will not easily internalize the unspoken rule that is that they will be acting as a messenger to their kids by keeping them from attending school on a regular basis. Ultimately, they will not be able to easily understand these and that they may not only doing a disservice to their children by setting them up to failure but they could also be setting them up to fail in life.

And for the many reasons stated above, it is important that elementary school students develop their own school attendance programs which has a particular focus geared towards educating parents. They have to understand the value of their children’s attendance. What is happening unfortunately is that most of the schools that were examined through the study seem to operate with the dangerous assumption that these parents already accept the importance of attendance. However, as has been pointed out earlier, the children who have an issue involving chronic absenteeism has parents that are either ignoring it or simply do not give value to education. The cold hard truth is that the majority of parents have the desire to give the best for their kids. However, they may not just not have known it yet, have not learned it or may not have been taught what it is. The school system must intervene and invest an amount to the school attendance programs. This resource will be used to teach the local communities about adequately teaching the constituents about the importance of attendance of children in schools.

School attendance programs could be made to play a big part in a school’s daily activities and even have a crucial role in giving the culture of attendance to the academic institution. The truth is that in every school there has always been an imposed attendance policy. And in most of these cases, this policy usually only aims to hand out punishments which means that it has given the parents of students a do or die option. This essentially says that they should get their child to class or be punished. In these policies, while it can have a positive effect for some instances, it will not always deter the lot of whom which has made it simpler to just skip school than to attend. And for those instances, the school will have to illustrate to them and give proof of how attendance in the school can lead their kids to a brighter future that they have envisioned for them.

These schools can be challenged and they should be talked to about developing attendance policies. They should also make programs which are not simply a means to prevent absences by imposing penalties. This usually starts with a sit down aimed at identifying the main cause of the problem which is absenteeism and it can be individualized. The school officials should act as arbiters and be willing to do the tough job of sitting down with the parents and start listening to their stories about why their kids has an issue with attendance.