Where Are My Students?

In a Baltimore Sun article this week, some “errors” were found in the city’s school budget which was approved by board members last month. The budget showed the current student enrollment to be 1,000 more students than are actually enrolled. The error was corrected this week, but the implications of a mistake that large are frightening. According to the Sun, at least 10 million dollars would be at stake with that kind of miscalculation of enrollment.

Now we all know this isn’t the first time Baltimore City Public Schools has made a mistake, but this particular mistake made me think of a related issue that has been of concern to me lately. That issue is student attendance. I have a question (don’t worry it’s hypothetical). Where are my students? My daily attendance in class is about half of what I have on my roll. When I start my first period, there are usually only 5 or 6 students seated before me. I am a huge supporter of small class sizes, but this is ridiculous. There are at least 10 other students on my roll who are not present on a daily basis. I know first period starting at 9:00 am can be hard to get to, but this isn’t a symptom of only my first class. There are at least 8-10 students missing daily in my other classes as well. This has posed a problem for me all year. I can’t get students to master objectives when they aren’t at school on a regular basis. And I certainly can’t see passing them on to English II when they’ve only attended English I 45 days of the year.

I had a conversation with a co-worker about this problem with attendance recently. She told me that the students who missed her class a lot were actually quite smart. They showed up on an HSA practice day and passed the exam that so many of our regularly-attending students cannot pass. What does this say? Have the smart kids figured something out about the quality of education in Baltimore? Or are they simply not being challenged in the courses they have, so they see no point in coming to school? I’m not sure.

Even if the quality of courses isn’t the best in Baltimore, I believe students need to be in school on a daily basis. Currently, at my school, the approach to improving attendance consists of threats about being dropped of the roll for poor attendance over the intercom. The problem is that the only students who hear these threats are the ones who are at school every day. In addition, teachers are asked to call the homes of students who are absent, but (this is nothing new) getting a working number for a student who has missed 20 days in a quarter is difficult to do. It scares me when I look at my attendance book and see so many absences. I worry about where those missing students actually are, what they are doing and what their future holds for them without an education. Dropping students off the roll takes care of one thing: making attendance numbers look better. What worries me is how those names that just disappear from our attendance list will affect this city’s future and the future of its education system. If these students see school as a waste of their time, something needs to be done to make them see the importance and value of education again.