Faced with a trend of slightly tardy students, the Hollister School District will roll out a new policy next year: letters home to the parents of students who are chronically late to class by one to 29 minutes.
A review of district data revealed 43 percent of attendance incidents recorded at sites across the district were for students less than a half-hour late to class.
“If you’re missing 15 or 20 minutes daily, you’re missing out on key instruction. Not only that, but the students are also developing bad habits,” said Cindy Cordova, the district’s interim coordinator of parent involvement and attendance.
Chronic student tardiness came up anecdotally at district principal meetings. The issue emerged again as administrators examined district attendance records while setting three-year goals for attendance as part of the new Local Control and Accountability Plan. The LCAP is a state framework spurring added funding that explains district goals, actions and investments for the next three school years starting in the fall.
Cordova noticed more issues at the kindergarten and first-grade levels, when students and parents are new to the district.
“Really at the elementary grades, it’s not the students. It’s the families that aren’t getting them there on time,” Cordova said. “Usually, it’s a matter of getting up a little earlier and maybe organizing the clothes the night before.”
Since many of the students who are tardy to class are actually late to the first period of the day and miss the first few minutes of morning core classes such as language arts and math, Cordova sees the letters as a way of educating the parents about the importance of bringing their children to school on time.
“Students that are on time every day do better,” said Cordova, a former principal who has seen a correlation between arriving to school frequently and on time with honor roll participation. “There is data to show that.”
She said in the early grades, it’s important to develop good habits.
“Those are habits for school and for life really.”
On average as a whole, the districtwide average daily attendance rate hovers at 95 percent, Cordova said.
“We’re on par with the state, but we can do better,” she said.
The district’s specific plans to “do better” are outlined in the current draft of its LCAP, which includes a goal of increasing the daily attendance rate by one percent next school year and an additional percent the following school year before keeping the rates steady at 97 percent every year after that.
“That’s realistic,” Cordova said. “Those are realistic goals.”
The idea to send home letters to students who are chronically tardy emerged after administrators looked at the best practices of other school districts with high attendance rates partnering with School Innovations & Advocacy, Inc., the same software company that keeps track of the Hollister district attendance information.
The company provides software that tracks four categories of attendance codes: late less than a half-hour; tardy more than a half-hour, which is considered truancy; unexcused absences and excused absences. The program automatically prepares letters for the parents of chronic attendance offenders based on data logged in its system. Every three weeks, the company sends principals at each school site a list of students about to receive letters home so that administrators can peruse the list before official notes are mailed.
The district has been on the progressive edge of encouraging on-time pupils. While the state education code only requires districts to issue letters when students are chronically truant, the district goes a step further and sends letters to the parents of students who have excessive excused absences on the books.
At the moment, three letters are issued to truant students: the first when they have four unexcused absences on record, the second when they have five unexcused absences and the third following nine unexcused absences.
The district chooses to send an additional two letters home when students have excessive excused absences on record – mailing a letter home when students have eight excused absences and a second letter when they have 12 excused absences. Officials have not decided trigger points regarding the two new letters for tardy students, Cordova said.
