MCPS Terminates Loss of Credit Policy

The Warrior Online:  MCPS Terminates LC Policy

Beginning next school year, Montgomery County students will no longer lose credit for classes in which they accumulated unexcused absences or tardies. The new policy aims to remove attendance as a factor for a student’s grade in a class. The revised policy will give students disciplinary consequences for unexcused absences with a minimum of a conference to a maximum of detention....

...Science teacher Mike Miehl was asked in late May to participate on Sherwood’s advisory committee, which included parents and students, to brainstorm ideas for the new attendance policy. Miehl agrees that the current system in broken, but he also has multiple concerns about the revised policy for next year. The new policy proposes consequences for unexcused absences or tardies. If every student was given detention for each unexcused absence, Miehl thinks security, teachers, and administration will be overwhelmed with disciplinary actions.

"Teachers already have a huge work load to have to implement and then follow through with disciplinary consequences for students who chronically skip was not resolved [at the meeting of the advisory group]. Will security handle them? What is the threshold of disciplinary action; i.e. how many unexcused absences does a student need in order for disciplinary action to kick in?"

...Another problem discovered by the county’s Project Team is how the current loss of credit policy disproportionately affects some student subgroups more than others. In MCPS, 19.2 percent of Hispanic students and 16.4 of black students lost credit in the spring on 2008, compared to only 4.1 percent of white students.