Imagine two very different students.

One struggles to keep up. The teacher puts out extra energy, setting up lesson plans specifically to accommodate the student, to help her get through the school year. 鈥淵ou don鈥檛 want to fail them,鈥 as Campbell High School teacher Corey Rosenlee says.

The other student seems brighter, but she lacks commitment and has concluded that she 鈥渃an game the system.鈥 She often cuts class, missing nearly all activities and discussions, and only attends on test days or when a paper is due.

So, while the first student might squeak by, the teacher would automatically fail the second one, right?

Actually, the second one might pass, too. Teachers, in many cases, can’t do much about frequently truant students. That is because few schools have a mandatory attendance requirement and teachers are expressly prohibited from .

It might seem surprising, but the Hawaii Department of Education doesn鈥檛 specify a minimum number of instructional days that middle and high school students must be present in order to be eligible to pass their courses.

Some teachers say that they end up feeling obliged to make a special effort to ensure students who miss a lot of classes are keeping up with the material, too.

The result, Rosenlee said, is an atmosphere in which students “don鈥檛 have to attend school to pass” and they “don鈥檛 gain the skills to do anything else.”

The school district has a policy based on a that mandates school enrollment for all children, but it doesn鈥檛 specify penalties for students who miss too many classes.

The DOE does require schools to keep track of attendance every day and to report to parents if a student has missed five or more days of class. But the state leaves it up to schools to decide what punishment, if any, such students should face 鈥 and, on the flip side, it does not offer incentives for students who have noteworthy attendance records. Just a few schools 鈥 Leilehua High School, for example 鈥 have applied for waivers from the Board of Education to implement their own specific attendance policies.

Teachers say the state is undermining efforts to give a boost to academic achievement by failing to establish a minimum attendance requirement for teenage students. Studies show that absenteeism often correlates with poverty and other social factors that require complex intervention strategies, but it鈥檚 unclear when a school should actually intervene to get a student on track.

Many other states have minimum attendance requirements and .

Part of a National Absenteeism Challenge

Conversations about the nation鈥檚 struggling public education system have and its link to high dropout rates. “Chronic” typically refers to a student who misses 10 percent or more of the school year, regardless of whether those absences are excused.

Research suggests that early intervention for kids who are chronically absent can markedly bolster students’ prospects for academic success. in Utah revealed that a student who was frequently absent in any year starting from eighth grade was 7.4 percent more likely to drop out than other kids.

鈥淵ou need to know who鈥檚 absent and know what the patterns are before you know what the solutions are,鈥 said Phyllis Jordan, spokeswoman for national advocacy group . 鈥淚t鈥檚 much easier to put a kid on track when he or she鈥檚 just missed a few days.鈥

Penalties for chronic absenteeism vary across other school districts but they run the gamut from required parent-counselor meetings to families being taken to court. It鈥檚 also common for teachers to factor attendance rates into the grades they give, Jordan said.

But Jordan prefers incentives for students who have good attendance records, such as pizza parties or extra credit points.

Michael Wooten, another Campbell teacher and former Civil Beat education columnist, suggested an automated roll call system as a simple solution to battle absenteeism and decrease the number of students who are 鈥渟lipping through the cracks.鈥

He said every teacher at Campbell has to manually record each class鈥檚 roll call, which results in double work and inefficient administrative holdups that waste time and energy.

鈥淎dministrators are supposed to administrate and teachers are supposed to teach,鈥 he said.

This year Hawaii has begun to use chronic absenteeism to help determine where elementary schools rank in , its new system for measuring school performance and improvement. Hawaii, which defines chronic absenteeism as 15 or more absent days during the school year, has even for being at the forefront on the problem.

But, at least for now, chronic absenteeism does not factor into the ranking of middle schools and high schools 鈥 an approach that Sen. Jill Tokuda, education committee chair, recently questioned in a legislative briefing.

Jordan also wondered why Hawaii sees fit to use chronic absenteeism to rank elementary, but not secondary schools.

The department’s spokeswoman, Donalyn Dela Cruz, said the DOE is considering factoring chronic absenteeism into secondary school performance ratings and that the DOE may propose possible improvements to Strive HI in the coming months.

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