Case Study: The Hempfield Area School District

Student attendance is important to reaching key academic milestones, graduating from high school and having access to opportunities as adults. Studies show that students who are chronically absent (miss 18 days or more during the school year for any reason) are less likely to graduate from high school. SPS Housing and Education Manager Kathlyn Paananen speaks to the significance of caring adults in a student’s life as having a proven, positive impact on student success, “Best practices to address attendance include having a supportive community that positively reinforce regular school attendance!”

Communication within the Westside School District No. 5 between the school district and the communities and families that it serves is a very dynamic process. I talked with district administrators, community members, researched pertinent information in the Arkansas State University library, and various governmental online sources and found very helpful information to include in this sociological inventory. Westside Consolidated School District No. 5 is a consolidation of primarily three school districts Bono, Cash and Egypt located in Craighead County, Arkansas in 1966 (Westside, 2017). The district also includes parts of Walnut Ridge and Alicia in Lawrence County and parts of Jonesboro in Craighead County. The district has three school buildings housing students from pre-Kindergarten through twelfth grade. The elementary school is the school for

Clay Country Schools are located in the southwest corner of North Carolina. The school district is currently the only that serves the county providing all grade levels, Pre-K through 12th Grade located on one campus. The campus consists of Hayesville Elementary School, Hayesville Middle School, and Hayesville High School. Historically Clay County Schools has not always been the only public school system to serve the county. Below is a case study of the history of the schools in Clay County and the demographic and fiscal characteristics of the current school system along with statewide comparisons and a recent North Carolina school lawsuit.

Seminole county schools is a top ranked school district, located in Central Florida. “Seminole County schools is ranked in the top 100 school districts in the nation in terms of offering high quality education in a moderately priced community. The school district has been recognized every year since 1992 for being in the top 10% of the nation's 15,600 school districts as meeting the needs of families choosing schools. Seminole County had 94% of their schools rated A or B schools with 80% earning an A.” ("Education", 2016)

I teach in the Westside Consolidated Number Five School District in Jonesboro, Arkansas. The school district is a consolidation of three small rural town school districts Bono, Egypt, and Cash, Arkansas in 1968. I met with my mentor Mr. Scott Gaunt the school district superintendent on January 18, 2017 between meetings with district leaders and countywide superintendents. We met and discussed the community relations plan and identified the two most important issues for our district as identified in the poll by the Phi Delta Kappan and the Gallop poll. The issues were the lack of financial support for the school district to provide an adequate education for students and the testing and regulations imposed on school districts that lower educational time for students while in school.

Leaguetown Independent School District is currently facing a conflict of whether having later start times would perhaps help the improvement of academic performance of Leaguetown Middle School and high school students. Superintendent Judith Owens has proposed a new schedule that would set later start times. A group of Leaguetown Middle School parents has organized to oppose the proposal.

and populations of greater Tucson. This school started as a small community school and as word spread

The South Beloit Community School District is located in South Beloit, Illinois on the boarder of Illinois and Wisconsin. The district has 5 school serving Pre-K – 12 with approximately, 1,100 students attending. The district believes in an open door policy and welcomes parents with their concerns and will work with parents to make sure the needs of the students are being met. Each school has their own special education classrooms with a well-qualified staff overseeing the process each day. Each school offers the individual care your child needs in order to reach their highest potential possible. The district offers social workers at each building to work closely with the teacher, student, and the parent to help the student reach their goals pertaining to social behaviors, and also in any other situations that may

Teenagers are expected to go from having their parents check them in and of school to being in college where nobody requires you to show up. Seth Miller, an admissions advisor at Eastern Washington University, remarks that “college students usually skip class just because it is the first time that feels like they can.” (The biggest addiction) Starting the habits early could be fundamental to many student’s success. I know you then might argue that then there would always be high schoolers skipping class. But I do not agree, because in high school there are true consequences to missing school. And having your parents check you in and out could always be put in place as a consequence to abusing the

The purpose of this study is to determine the causal effect of daily start times on academic performance. Further, this study aims to examine other mechanisms, such as adolescent hormones, and their impact on academic performance.

My attendance through high school has been pretty good, I was never really absent because I knew that if i missed school I would have to make up the work that I missed. But if I was absent it was due to school activities or medical reasons but they were all excused. I realized sophomore year that having great attendance was important because It reflected not only on your schoolwork but also on the kind of person you are. If you continued to have great attendance that meant you were not behind on schoolwork and it also showed that you were committed to your school. Being committed to your studies preps you for the near future when you are in college where attending class is your option, do you want to learn from the professor or do you want

Although it has never been researched and analyzed specifically for the Hempfield Students other studies have shown that attendance and grades do go hand in hand. There is a 2008 study conducted by the Rodel Community Scholars at Arizona State University. This particular study tracked students from kindergarten through high school. Not only did this study find a link between attendance and grades, but also between attendance and dropout patterns. Basically, behavioral differences are apparent between those who go on to graduate and those who drop out. The study actually put a number on it – students who missed around 124 days of school by

The Further Education Funding council (1997) stated that “Attendance in the classes observed averaged 78% and varied from 59% to 95%” (as cited in Longhurst,1999, p.61). Student absenteeism has been significantly increasing over the last few years hence compelling universities to intervene in order to modulate these absences because skipping classes affects the quality of a student’s education as well as the morale of the faculty(Wyatt,1992) resulting in inadequate learning on the part of those missing and a degree of disruption to the conduct of classes for those who are present (Longhurst,1999). Regarding the relationship between student absenteeism and academic achievement, Wadesango and Machingambi(2011) stated that when students are absent from class, they miss valuable information from peer-lecturer interaction and the benefits of the specific examples lecturers use to clarify difficult concept(p.89), Because skipping class had a considerable negative impact on a student’s learning process,it is important to learn more about students who skip class and their reasons for doing so because solving this problem would ameliorate the learning process.Existing literature shows that there’s a link between student absenteeism and 3 causes: work, the lecturer and finally the course itself. So what are the major causes of absenteeism?

State and national programs are failing in deterring absenteeism and that is because they fail to focus on the larger picture. Hitting multiple problem areas at once is the key. Strategies have to swing the balance between carrot and stick, finding a balance between rehabilitation and penalty. An ideal course of action would be one that is multifaceted and focuses on the cause of truancy and not the action as well as one that involves the parents or guardian(s). This would include tactics such as monitoring students that have shown chronic nonattendance while articulating clear and concise punishments for failure, the right to detain truants, support and counseling for parents as well as students, reward incentives, and afterschool and in school programs that keep students engaged.

A research into some of the major causes and effects of truancy and absenteeism at Crossdale High School in Nyanga.