In the 2026-2027 school year, the attendance committee and pack committee are trying to reinstate an old attendance rule which implies if a student misses ten days in a row of the class, there will be consequences. Such consequences include: they could fail automatically, be dropped from the class, or they could be charged a fine ranging from $250 to $500.
If a teacher feels as though chronic absences are affecting the students performance in class, they will contact a guardian to instate a plan on how to fix this absence issue.
The goal of this plan is to reduce the amount of skipping that students have been doing and the overall amount of absences by students. This only applies to students who have an unexcused absence and are gone without reason. An excused absence would not count towards this rule as it could be for a reason such as illness or sports.
Chronic absenteeism rates show that the percent of students who miss 10% or more of days of school contribute to the absenteeism rates. This would be 18 or more days out of a school year with a total of 180 days.
This is a concern because student engagement and overall achievement suffers when students are absent. These students are also far more likely to drop out of school.
The average student misses nine days of school throughout the whole school year.
Truancy has become a real problem in Sentinel. An estimated 15% of Sentinel students contribute to truancy regularly. As of this school year, there hasn’t been much done about this. Some Sentinel students have 200+ absences from semester one alone.
This is why Sentinel is taking action and locking down on attendance.
From the Sentinel staff, Patricia parish Saraf says that “this is a fair rule unless there is documentation why a student exceeded 10 absences”. She also says, “Any student who’s absent 10 or more times in a class can’t possibly succeed or have confidence that is essential for success”.
Saraf thinks that this rule will be beneficial and help students and parents be more accountable, which is good because with 200+ students exceeding 10 absences a year, Sentinel needs help improving its attendance.
Saraf says that another way we can try to improve attendance is to highlight students who have honor roll grades and that qualify for honor roll. Demonstrating how attendance contributes to higher grades as it’s important for peers to highlight one another.
As a teacher herself, Saraf states that when students are chronically absent, it is definitely hard to get them caught up. It has an overall negative effect on their ability to succeed in class. As for students themselves, being absent affects their overall success tremendously because they don’t have the skill set to succeed in class, and it builds poor habits for the future. For example, if a person is late to their job or simply doesn’t show up, it could quickly lead to them getting fired and doesn’t leave a favorable impression of them as an accountable person.
Jessica Wilsey, a math teacher at Sentinel, has a more negative feeling towards this new rule, saying that it could make it difficult for busy students to succeed in school. Wilsey thinks that the root issue of poor attendance is students simply not caring about school, grades, or their future. Wilsey knows that Sentinel students won’t like this rule and won’t be likely to follow it. However, she says that “if students find a way to care about grades and school then attendance rates will improve, but that comes from passion rather than a school rule”.
Isabella Earner, a freshman at Sentinel, states that her feelings toward this policy are definitely negative as well, as she says that, “This policy is very unlikely to be beneficial because students have a variety of reasons why they miss school that may not count as an excused absence”.
Isabella herself thinks that this rule will not help her succeed as a student and even goes on to say that her grades will “plummet” due to her absences in the first semester alone.
Even with this rule, Isabella doesn’t think this will help improve Sentinel’s attendance rates and that students who already miss school will not change their behavior because of a rule because they clearly already do not care about their grades which is the root issue.
Isabella says that out of people she knows at Sentinel, at least 60% have over 10 absences.
Many students likely feel similar to Isabella, as well as teachers in thinking that this new rule will not help attendance rates increase.
As the 26-27 school year comes around, let’s all hope that Sentinel’s attendance rates rise, as well as a possible newfound passion to care about grades. This rule has not officially been instated and is only a rumor as of right now. However, let’s hope it’s instated so that Sentinel’s attendance can improve.
