...Nearly 10 percent of Montgomery County high school students are chronic class cutters, with thousands more skipping in the elementary and middle grades.
Almost 1,000 students in the county were labeled "habitual truants," defined as absent without an excuse at least one day per week, on average. About 9,000 students were labeled "chronically absent," meaning absent at least 20 days without an accepted excuse...
The truth is that at the schools with the highest truancy rate is that nothing is usually done to discourage the truants from walking out the door. The teachers and security would rather not deal with them because they are troublemakers so they look the other way.
I would like to commend the reporting of truancy going on here, though. How easy would it be for administrators to ignore the problem as so many schools fail to report bullying incidents for appearances' sake.
We mustn't kill the messenger.
I'd also like to say I don't feel it is a teacher's job to police truancy. Security, administrators, and counselors should be addressing troublesome students. Teachers should be there to deliver and measure the retention of knowledge. Period. Discipline duties should consist entirely of sending kids out of class to an appropriate staff person and that one method should be made consistently effective.
School administrators will too often fail to provide this support. School boards should be ready to back administrative staff that dispense effective discipline or take an active role in constructing new methods and tools that CAN be used to keep classrooms performing efficiently.
The MCPS administrators didn't release the report. Is that who you refer to when you say "administrators"?
This report and data was compiled by the Office of Legislative Oversight of the Montgomery County Council. Without that outside office's digging into MCPS, this information would not have been made public.
The data was compiled, surely. But who recorded the absences that amounted to 14 to 19%? Teachers and administrative staff (whichever staff responsible for data entry. I suspect teachers do not feed the data directly into student records each morning.)
Administrators I'm thinking of would include someone delegated to coordinate parents, counselors, legal personnel, perhaps police, and others I'm not aware of to bring about some type of educational program for frequent truants. I do not claim intimate familiarity with the precise combination of staff that develop such contingency plans, but the work involved should be minimal for the teacher who should be focusing on delivering lessons to those that show up.
Others may have a different view of an appropriate list of duties for teachers which may include more intense involvement with absentees.
The truth is that at the schools with the highest truancy rate is that nothing is usually done to discourage the truants from walking out the door. The teachers and security would rather not deal with them because they are troublemakers so they look the other way.
ReplyDeleteI would like to commend the reporting of truancy going on here, though. How easy would it be for administrators to ignore the problem as so many schools fail to report bullying incidents for appearances' sake.
ReplyDeleteWe mustn't kill the messenger.
I'd also like to say I don't feel it is a teacher's job to police truancy. Security, administrators, and counselors should be addressing troublesome students. Teachers should be there to deliver and measure the retention of knowledge. Period. Discipline duties should consist entirely of sending kids out of class to an appropriate staff person and that one method should be made consistently effective.
School administrators will too often fail to provide this support. School boards should be ready to back administrative staff that dispense effective discipline or take an active role in constructing new methods and tools that CAN be used to keep classrooms performing efficiently.
Mr. Jacobs,
ReplyDeleteThe MCPS administrators didn't release the report. Is that who you refer to when you say "administrators"?
This report and data was compiled by the Office of Legislative Oversight of the Montgomery County Council.
Without that outside office's digging into MCPS, this information would not have been made public.
The data was compiled, surely.
ReplyDeleteBut who recorded the absences that amounted to 14 to 19%? Teachers and administrative staff (whichever staff responsible for data entry. I suspect teachers do not feed the data directly into student records each morning.)
Administrators I'm thinking of would include someone delegated to coordinate parents, counselors, legal personnel, perhaps police, and others I'm not aware of to bring about some type of educational program for frequent truants. I do not claim intimate familiarity with the precise combination of staff that develop such contingency plans, but the work involved should be minimal for the teacher who should be focusing on delivering lessons to those that show up.
Others may have a different view of an appropriate list of duties for teachers which may include more intense involvement with absentees.