Attendance plan

Woonsocket Superintendent Patrick McGee has outlined a new attendance initiative that will hopefully cut down on absenteeism.

WOONSOCKET — It should come as no surprise that local public schools face an uphill battle against chronic absenteeism, in particular at the high school level, where attendance can also impact the school’s graduation rate.

And for that reason School Superintendent Patrick McGee has outlined a new attendance initiative for the district that will seek to address chronic absenteeism from the early days of a child’s education right though the secondary level.

The idea is to get everyone in the district to think about ways to improve student attendance through greater attention to attendance trends and student and family awareness of the importance of attending school.

McGee listed a number of new focus points on improving attendance, and also suggested that more needs to be done to keep parents involved in monitoring their child’s attendance and getting them too school on time. The school department’s attendance staff already has contact with the families of students with attendance problems but the new goals include increasing parental involvement in maintaining good attendance overall.

“You have to get children to school, you have to make sure they are coming to school every day and that they are coming to school on time. Otherwise they are not going to be as successful as the students who do come to school regularly every day,” McGee said while outlining the initiative’s advice to parents and guardians.

The state Department of Education’s InfoWorks website lists the high school as reporting an attendance rate of 86 percent for 2015-16 in comparison to the statewide average of 91 percent at that school level. Chronic absenteeism, students with more than 18 days of absences, was 44 percent for the high school as opposed to 26 percent statewide at the high school level.

One of the new goals worked out by the district’s administrators and principals will be an effort to keep track of students who are chronically absent early in their education careers and pass the information along to the next school level as they move up through the grades, according to McGee.

The district’s administrators would “look for students that are chronically absent and have conversations with those students and have conversations with their parents and notify families that these students are chronically absent,” he said.

The district’s new action plan for attendance would seek to have all principals and all administrator “on the same page,” so that the plan can move forward under a unified effort and address the problems, he said.

“Students coming into the district from preschool to kindergarten, that is a critical transition period because they just beginning their education,” McGee said.

The preschool program can provide a “heads up” on the families of children who are “in preschool and whose attendance is poor,” McGee said.

The early childhood programs can provide attendance information that will follow students into the district, “so we are aware when these students register in our elementary schools, who they are so we can really sort of take notice and keep an eye out for students who had poor attendance at the preschool level,” he explained.

Overall, local attendance at the elementary level “is pretty strong,” McGee noted, but even at that level it doesn’t mean the attendance numbers of 90 or 93 percent cover all students.

“Within that group we still have students that are chronically absent,” he explained. “And we want to make sure that when children go from elementary school to middle school there is that communication between the administration and teachers to the guidance department and principals to keep track of those students who in the fifth grade, fourth grade, third grade and so on may have had spotty attendance,” he said. “The other end of that is now going from eighth grade to the ninth grade and making sure that communication between the guidance department and administration of the middle school is strong with the guidance department and administration of the high school so those kids coming in, they now they are red-flagged, they have an idea of who they are and have those challenges with respect to attendance at the middle school level,” McGee said.

“That’s a priority and that is something that we are starting to do,” he said.

The district also plans to provide more transportation services to sections of the city that may not currently have transportation and as a result causes pockets of poor attendance from those sections.

By creating new bus stops under the plan, “we will be servicing more students and getting more kids on the bus, getting them to school and our hopes is that by doing that that we will focus on a certain portion of the population who are chronically absent as well,” McGee said.

The plan also calls for more ways of getting the message home to parents that their children need to attend school, whether that is through letters or school messaging, and also to reward good attendance or improved attendance with special functions and events, he said.

“It is a way of starting the school year and communicating with parents and letting them know they need to be sure that their children are coming to school everyday and coming to school on time,” McGee said.

The attendance rallies, he noted, could be held in conjunction with school partner groups or community organizations like the Rotary or Elks clubs, he noted.

“If you want to call it an initiative, it is the most important initiative we have to make sure that our students are attending school regularly,” McGee said.

The data from Kids Count on local students did show improvement for the early childhood grades, McGee said. “We did get improvement in our early childhood attendance so across the state we did get some real dramatic gains that were really through the work of our principals and our staff,” he said. “We have all be working hard but we’ve sort of been working in different silos and the focus here was to get everyone together on the same page,” McGee said of the new initiative. “It’s a common message, common to the entire district regarding attendance in schools,” he said.

McGee said his message to parents would be, “You have to get your children to school, you have to make sure they are coming to school every day and that they are coming to school on time. Otherwise they are not going to be as successful as the students who do come to school regularly, every day,” McGee said.