Post-Pandemic attendance and chronic absenteeism in Jamestown Public Schools is improving.
JPS Superintendent Dr. Kevin Whitaker, presenting to the Jamestown School Board, said the average daily attendance is dramatically up since 2020, “And chronic absenteeism is dramatically down, especially among sub-groups. So, the trends are good. The results are not as good as we want them to be. We want the chronic absenteeism to be as low as possible. We want average daily attendance to be as high as possible. But, we have hit the 90 percentile, 91 percentile, in most of the buildings. Some trouble still at the High School and we’re working on that and our chronic absenteeism numbers are on the way down.”
Whitaker said, according to a White House report, the number of public school students nationally who are chronically absent, meaning they miss at least 10 percent of days in a school year, whether excused or unexcused, has nearly doubled. Research has shown that students with high rates of absenteeism are at the greatest risk of falling behind and dropping out of school.
Whitaker said researchers developed an Early Warning System that can help identify students in early grades who may be falling off the graduation path using the criteria of attendance, behavior, and core classes, “So, attendance means.. if you can lower the number of students missing 10% of the school year or more they have a better chance at graduating. Behavior is if you have a large number of small out of school suspensions or in-school suspensions or even a few long-term out of school suspensions, that gets in the way of graduation. And ‘C’ is core classes. Are you passing your core classes.”
Whitaker said those criteria are highly predictive with sixth or seventh grade students who struggle with one or more of those having a 60% chance of not graduating from high school.
He said district wide Intervention tactics include classroom and group interventions; small group and individual planning; and focused individual interventions.
Whitaker said interventions at Jamestown High School include tutoring and check in/check out meetings, “Attempting to build relationships and help a student to track their own success on a daily basis, smaller chunks.. greater success as opposed to larger chunks of time, home visits, building those relationships with parents, parent conferences, child study team referrals, literacy intervention.. this has to do with academics as well. But if you’re struggling with reading, you tend to disengage with school as well.”
Whitaker said the main goal is to prevent failure and to provide students the best chance of graduation.
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