As the school year nears, attendance is an important focus
By Shannon Weidemann (McKone) on Friday, August 11th, 2023 in More Top Stories Northeastern Oregon News
LA GRANDE – The 2023-2024 school year is starting soon. La Grande School District Superintendent George Mendoza (GM) sat down with Elkhorn Media Group (EMG) to talk about the upcoming school year.
(EMG) Superintendent Mendoza, with the school year quickly approaching what is happening now in preparation?
(GM) On the 23rd, we have a staff rally for us. Our theme will be Impact and how staff impact one another. We’ll hear about different things that we can do to increase our impact and stay positive and resilient. We also go over the day-to-day operations so everybody’s ready to go.
(EMG) When is the first day of school for students?
(GM) K through seven students, as well as our ninth graders, show up on the 28th, That’s also our introduction day, making sure people get to know the staff, but also the rules, the structures, the routines, and the procedures, all of that happens on that first day for, for folks that are new to buildings typically. And then grades eight, 10 and 12 will be Tuesday. All students are expected to be at school on the 29th.
(EMG) Is there any focus that the district has this year?
(GM) The reality is that attendance is one of the bigger things that we’re talking about. Um, you know, the. The state has new metrics that they’ve been talking about, that’s called regular attendance, regular attender rates. A regular attender is somebody that comes to school more than 90% of the time.
And the reality is, we were somewhere near 62% on an average basis of students that attended more than 90%.
So that means about 40%, we have 171 school days, so about 40% of our students missed more than 17 days of school. We have to figure out attendance. We had covid and I think a lot of people stayed home, didn’t want to spread germs, a lot of things taking place that way, but the reality is, I have little cliche things that I say to people once in a while, one of them is, “it’s hard to be great when you’re gone a lot.” “It’s hard to be consistent when you’re not there consistently.” There are a lot of things that happen when we’re not attending regularly, a lot of missed instruction, a lot of misunderstandings, a lot of partial understandings, a lot of misconceptions. A lot of, I’ll just say fill in the hole, fill in the gap type stuff that happens with math or science or social studies or reading, and those are things that get in the way of somebody feeling really successful at times.
(EMG) Thanks Superintendent Mendoza for joining us today.
