ATHENS, Alabama — Nearly 1 in 5 Alabama students are chronically absent from school. A reported 127,000 students missed more than 18 days of school. Limestone County Schools Director of Safety and Discipline Shaun Butler said from a district level they have put several procedures in place. "Post COVID, you know, like most of the country, we're dealing with, you know, higher absentee rates than before. The chronic absenteeism by the state is classified as 18 absences or more. Now once you become unexcused absences 7, then you fall under what would we consider truant. And then at that point it falls under the truancy court to handle that."
But he says they also built in some flexibility with some e-learning days. "They can apply for an e-learning day through the system in advance and get their instruction online for those days that they missed throughout the year, so they're not missing instruction. "
Butler also shared some of the reasons kids are missing from classrooms. "You can go all the way from socioeconomic status to a lot of kids came out of post COVID. They're not comfortable in the environment. They're not [comfortable with] everything from just extracurricular activities, parent notes, where they feel like, 'Well, it's okay to miss a day here and there. We can we can write a note, we can go, you know, emergencies happen.'"
Some of the schools have also incorporated their own attendance reward programs. "We do a perfect attendance certification for everybody, but some of the schools do luncheons where they provide lunch for good attendance students. Some of them have even gotten donations from school partners where they give them gift cards for achieving certain attendance records or milestones," says Butler.
So are there any targeted work organizations helping the effort to keep students in the classroom? Yes, but Butler emphasizes the important of parent interaction. "Well, every time we do open house and parent nights and parent conferences, you know, we communicate attendance, the importance of it and the reasons they need to be in school. Students also have we have a peer helper organization at the schools that, you know, students that may be struggling or just interested in losing connection with wanting to be in school where they have kind of like a mentor to help them along the way in whatever they need."