It’s no secret that high schools across the country have struggled with attendance since the Coronavirus pandemic, and Hellgate High School is not an outlier. Students have been attending class less on average in the past three years, partially because of the pandemic’s side effect of normalizing online work. This year, Hellgate’s administration introduced a new policy to try to bring attendance back to pre-Covid levels. The policy brings a number of changes varying in impact, centering around making sure students are prioritizing success in their classes.
Britt Hanford, one of Hellgate’s assistant principals, said that the policy comes with three major changes. The first is how an absence is excused. “We spent a lot of time in past years categorizing absences. Absences excused by parents, a (sports) team, absences for illness or bereavement,” said Hanford. “At the end of the day, the impact of an absence is the same regardless of the reason.”
In an email to the Hellgate community, principal Judson Miller said that administration was “trying to move away from the language (Tardy, Excused, Unexcused) and focus more on the solution (work completion) and bell-to-bell in-person attendance”. According to the new policy, it doesn’t matter why a student is absent, they just have to find a way to make up for the work that they missed.
The second major change, which Hanford said has resulted in some initial backlash, is the new idea of taking students who are missing a lot of a particular class out of the physical classroom.
“I think there was a lot of misinformation about us just yanking kids out of classes once they miss (a number of days),” said Hanford. “That’s not the case whatsoever.” Hanford said that if it’s clear a student isn’t succeeding in their in person setting, administration will attempt to give them another way of learning their coursework through an online, in-the-building format. “We want to have another tool in our toolbox to offer kids who are struggling or missing a lot of class,” said Hanford.
The final policy change is an emphasis on in-person work. Hanford said that because of Covid, the majority of a student’s work was able to be completed online. This allowed for students to get lots, if not all, of their classwork done while not attending class. Hanford said this is a problem.
“We are a school; we are in the business of doing school in person,” said Hanford. Because of this, less classwork will be accessible or able to be completed on Google Classroom.
A lot of confusion has come with these three changes among both teachers and students. Anna Bacon, an English teacher at Hellgate, addressed this confusion. “I’m not one hundred percent sure what the attendance policy is,” she said. Additionally, she said she’s talked with her peers among the teaching staff who share this confusion. “Once we get more clarity about how (the new policy) is supposed to work, it’ll work great,” said Bacon.
In the meantime, she said the policy is changing how she teaches her class, and that takes some getting used to. “I have to do more bell work, or work at the beginning and end of class,” said Bacon.
This confusion about the new attendance policy is shared by Sabine Glaser and Camilla Burnich, both juniors. “It was pretty unclear the first couple days of school,” said Glaser. “Different teachers said different things about it… but I think as the year goes on it will become more clear. We’re all just flowing into it.”
While aspects of the new policy may be confusing, the sentiment is shared among the Hellgate community that it’ll sort itself out as the year goes on. The policy, in theory, serves to get students to their classes, in person, and establish class work as their priority, and hopefully it can do just that.
