La Grande School District seeing increases in district-wide attendance rate
By Garrett Christensen on Tuesday, January 16th, 2024 in More Top Stories Northeastern Oregon News
LA GRANDE – There are many arguments as to what the most important aspects of the learning process are. Is communication the ultimate key to proper learning? Will a good environment make or break a student’s grades? How does a child’s own investment in the subject play into things? One factor that may seem obvious but can be overlooked is the act of simply showing up at school consistently.
This topic was a major, and thankfully positive, point at the La Grande School Board’s most recent meeting. According to Superintendent George Mendoza, the district has seen an overall increase in attendance rates district-wide over the past year. As he explained in further detail:
“In general, we’re exceeding our attendance compared to last year by more than 7% as a school district. Greenwood Elementary is actually almost 11% higher than they were last year in terms of regular attendance. Central is about 8% higher. The middle school is almost 5%. The high school, about 5%. Island City, which already had a high percentage, is even higher at an almost 96% regular attendance rate.”
This isn’t just a meaningless statistic, as, for the La Grande School District (LGSD) at least, it represents a recommitment to education by the student body. While absences, excused or otherwise, certainly happen to many students and can cause some issues with missing assignments or instructions, chronic absences can easily hurt a student’s future. Lack of direction, lower grades, and fewer credit hours can all add up. As further discussed by Mendoza:
“The reality is attendance is the foundation for learning. So, attendance is important for growing skills in math or growing skills in reading and then also raising achievement scores. When students don’t attend, a lot of times misunderstandings or partial understandings of concepts and skills take place. Then also when a lot of students don’t attend, the lessons don’t get taught, or the units of instruction go slower and then it takes longer, and that also means learning loss over time or just not enough content discussed.”
In this case, a chronically absent student is any student that misses more than 10% of all classes. To combat this, the LGSD have been working on a variety of informational outlets to help both parents and students understand the importance of attendance, such as pamphlets, social media posts, and even direct outreach. Quarterly letters are being sent to parents specifically to let them know how many days their child has been absent vs in class. This isn’t made to guilt students or act as some form of punishment for truancy but is rather designed to be supportive. Phone calls with students and parents allow them to give direct feedback and allow the school to be more accommodating if needed.
Above all, however, the goal is to get students to understand the importance of attendance and have them participate voluntarily, and hopefully enthusiastically. As best described by Mendoza:
“Chronically absent students don’t learn as much. Chronically absent students don’t pass their classes as much. Chronically absent students usually don’t earn credits as much or don’t graduate at as high a percentage. So, the reality is we’re trying to do a drip of information so that people know where they’re at relative to the target, and then monitoring of that, and then conversations where we talk with students and parents to see how we can help and clarify the importance of attending.”
