Author Spotlight
Kate Heitmann
*name changed to protect identity
Senior Jane Orteza* filled out yet another make-up sheet for her Individual Fitness class, describing the activity she completed to make up for missing class that day. She could’ve made it to class that day. But when she considered doing a yoga video at home in her comfortable clothes over doing HITT training in the cold gym wearing her school clothes, the answer was clear.
She’d rather do it at home. But with being able to fill out only so many absence sheets at once, her grade dropped, leaving her with a D and no desire to go to class.
Orteza is one of many students who would rather complete their school work at home instead of in-person at school, choosing individually how to spend their time, with over 250 parents and guardians called into the attendance line to dismiss their child on Feb. 10 alone.
This attendance issue is relatively new, too. In 2022, East’s attendance rate dropped to 90%, while the state level was 92.1%, according to the Kansas State Department of Education. However in 2021, East’s attendance rate was at 94.5%, higher than the state level 93.8%. The attendance rate had stayed consistent since 2019 maintaining between 94-95% from 2019-2021, higher than the state average.
The drop looks like the slew of students leaving seminar. It looks like the constant stream of office and counseling aides interrupting class to deliver passes. It looks like multiple students who stand up in the middle of classes and say “my parents called me out.”
With a decreased attendance rate, administration is attempting to bring the attendance rate up to the level it was before, but is uncertain how best to do so. In addition to the drop in attendance, more seniors requested and were granted reduced schedules for their last semester. Although administration does not have the number of this exact increase, it was more than they expected and they are uncertain as to why it’s so high.
“I look at our attendance, it’s so good,” Associate Principal Dr. Susan Leonard said. “But we’re also a really high achieving school. I think those things are [correlated]. And so when we see little things, it’s easy for someone to say, ‘Oh, don’t freak out. Your attendance is really good.’ But a little dip tells me it’s a little dip, and at East we expect high achievement. So I want it to stay up high.”
Although an attendance rate of 90% is still relatively high compared to the 89% national average for fall 2020, according to the National Survey of Public Education’s Response to COVID-19, there is a strong correlation between attendance, GPA and test scores. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, students who attend school regularly are likely to achieve higher than students who attend school irregularly.
“We enjoy better attendance, probably than a lot of other schools,” Leonard said. “But we’re also a really high-performing school. And I would say those two are correlated. So even when we see a small dip, we want to be really aware of it.”
Wanting to bring awareness to students about the consequences the low attendance can have on academic performance, administration has created a social media campaign. Converting a slideshow presentation Barikmo had made into Instagram posts, they’ve so far dropped over 10 Instagram posts describing predictors of post-secondary success, with at least six dedicated to attendance and how missing school adds up over time, using the hashtag #MakeEveryDayCount.
Despite the good intent, junior Izzy Margolin feels guilty when she sees these posts describing how the amount of time she misses accumulates over a year. However, missing school is hard to not to do as she has a chronic illness and five appointments which she has to attend every week. With so many to schedule, her dad isn’t always able to schedule them outside of school hours, like a post suggested.
For Orteza, it’s been difficult to make it to school after constantly working on schoolwork and feeling burnout this past semester. Along with struggling with anxiety and gender dysphoria, going to school often would only worsen her feelings. Her mom would let her sleep in occasionally or take a mental health day, but the absences piled up, and she became truant.
Students become truant after 10 absences, regardless of if they are excused. After 10 absences, families will receive a letter in the mail informing them of the truancy status. After being declared truant, students must provide documentation for their absence to be excused or may have to go to court if they continue to receive undocumented or unexcused absences.
Attendance clerk Joan Gustafson feels as though many parents do not fully understand what truancy means. In many cases, parents are the only ones who are able to keep their students in school, emails sent to students and parents won’t always bring a student back to class and truancy is handled at the district and state level, according to math teacher Emily Colebank.
Colebank feels that the parents are the only ones who can truly make a kid go to class. There are some students who she has seen only twice this semester and emailing them and their parents only goes so far.
She has seen students who have come back to school after becoming truant. But the problems for those students continue as they’ve missed several math units and aren’t able to keep up with the new content, leaving the students overwhelmed and unwilling to return to class — perpetuating this cycle of missing school.
And when the students do return, Colebank has to find time to make up the lost instructional time they had missed, which is difficult for her to do when she has to grade papers, teach, create lesson plans as well as help the students who are showing up every day to class.
Despite missing over ten days, Orteza still has been able to pass all of her classes, except Individual Fitness. She makes more of an effort to attend her biology and English periods as the daily work for those classes are hands-on or discussion based.
For her math and history class, it’s become more difficult to bring herself to attend school after seeing how easy it was to do her schoolwork from home during online school in 2020 and 2021.
During online classes, Orteza was able to eat breakfast when she wanted to and work in her room — the space she feels most comfortable. Compared to the cold temperatures, fluorescent lighting, and tiled flooring of the school, she would much rather go home and work on her personal crochet project in the comfort of her room when there is idle time.
Students are now realizing how easy it is to be called out of school without repercussions, and along with that, parents are realizing the importance of mental health days and taking breaks, according to Junior Margot Beaver. Students only have to text their parents for them to five minutes later hear their name being called over the intercom, calling for their dismissal.
Gustafason estimates around 50% of the calls made by parents are for immediate dismissal of their child within 30 minutes — these absences are not planned for in advance, but instead are students leaving when they want to. With each call, she has to calculate how many minutes of a class a student has missed and determine if the absence counts as being tardy, half of a class, half a day or a full day, with each attendance requiring documentation in Skyward and communication with the teacher.
Despite missing several class periods each week, Margolin has been able to keep up with her school work in part because of her teachers’ support such as more leniency in due dates, as well as the increased accessibility to assignments on Canvas. With weekly schedules and assignments all posted to Canvas — the platform SMSD switched to from Google Classroom for the remote 2020 school year — students are able to access the assignments they missed and make them up without any difficulty, often even being able to make up the assignments in less time with fewer distractions, according to Orteza.
And even for students who aren’t missing school, Canvas allows them to complete their work outside of school, often at a faster pace, offering more flexibility to spend their time how they wish.
Beaver will have her mom call her out once or twice a week for a class period if the teacher gives the class work time. But she doesn’t believe her teachers should give her busy work. She appreciates the work time her teacher gives her but believes she should be able to use it as she feels best.
“I like that it is easy to leave if you don’t have anything to do because a lot of times teachers are like, ‘Okay, we have a workday today’ and it’s like then ‘why would I sit in this stuffy classroom with my AirPods in, when I could be at home and do whatever at home?’” Beaver said. “Especially if you don’t have any missing work. You’re just there doing nothing like why be at school? I understand the importance of attendance but not in that case.”
With this, students are more focused on completing their schoolwork rather than being at school for the whole school day. Students are finding more independence in their schoolwork as they opt to leave school and complete their work individually instead of together in class, all while their grades remain strong. Barikmo attributes these tendencies to COVID-19, where students were given more freedom in how they spent their time.
“When we were in remote education and in that initial COVID time, I think people got used to having more freedom,” Barikmo said. “And I also think that that put in place some unfortunate habits around, ‘Well, if I just do my work, then I’m learning. Learning is more than just checking a box.”
Along with leaving school to complete their work individually, seniors are choosing to have a reduced schedule. Students are taking off one or two classes and using the extra time to catch up on sleep, work at a job, or take college credit classes, according to Peres. However, administration is concerned at the number of students who requested a reduced schedule.
“I know that it is more than we anticipated, and because it is more than we anticipated, we’re a little concerned with the message that it sends,” Principal Jason Peres said. “I think some of our students are telling us that they don’t see what we do here as important.”
Leonard believes that high schoolers should be filling their schedules with electives instead of getting a reduced schedule, even if they don’t have a future interest in it.
“To me, the magic of high school is the people around you,” Leonard said. “And so you may say ‘Ceramics? I don’t need ceramics. I’m never gonna do anything with ceramics.’ But when will you ever get to be on a potter’s wheel? And when will you ever be around people who are going to make a life making art…In high school, you have this magical time that you’re around a whole lot of people with so many different talents. Believe it or not, they’re going to hold a special place in your heart someday. You’re growing up with them and having these big formative years together, so we’d like for people to enjoy their whole day.”
Senior Anohita Paul, who has a reduced schedule, often goes home during sixth hour to take a break or get a head start on her homework. She found how during online and hybrid school, there were more breaks worked in throughout the day, as students were able to go get a snack or use the restroom when they needed or run errands in the morning on the at-home learning days during hybrid. She found these breaks were very helpful when going through her day and decided she needed time to study to help stay on top of her five IB classes.
Administration is supportive of students who want reduced schedules to take classes at Johnson County Community College for college credit or are interning with a company in the field they’re interested in, but administration is all in agreement that they don’t want students who have reduced schedules to use them to catch up on sleep or to sit in their car for 45 minutes.
Leonard is concerned that students who are taking advantage of reduced schedules, leaving early or being called out of school won’t be able to make it through real-world situations like in college where professors aren’t keeping attendance or at a job where employees are expected to work full 8-hour workdays.
Beaver however is not concerned for college or her career. She has seen how her parents, who are both their own boss, have managed their own schedules successfully and feels that the independence over her schedule is beneficial.
“I don’t really want to go and work for a corporation and a boss that’s deciding when I have to be at work, not necessarily me being lazy and saying ‘I don’t want to go to work’ because I do want to work,” Beaver said. “It’s just nice getting to choose when you’re working.”
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