Attendance Among Hastings High School Students has Improved.
Drew Danielson is Attendance Coordinator and Assistant Activities Director at HHS. This year will be Danielson’s third year serving at these positions.
Attendance this year has been better compared to the last two years, however the number of absences the past two years have been higher than normal because of COVID. Mr. Danielson would say that September has been the best month for attendance that the school has had during his time at the high school.
“My first year was with Covid still around so it was kind of hard to track that first year. Last year was a little bit high, and I’d say we’ve come down,” Danielson said. “This is by far the best month that we’ve had, so let’s keep that up.”
Danielson doesn’t think that attendance is a major problem in the school, and he thinks the school’s attendance is similar to attendance in other schools.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the statistical center of the U.S. Department of Education, the amount of chronic absences decreased in 61 percent of public schools across the country from the 2020-2021 school year to the 2021-2022 school year, the most recent year that data is available. The average percent of chronically absent students during the 2021-2022 school year was 17 percent.
“I would say our school is like every school in America right now,” Danielson said.
The student body is made up of around 1100 students, and about 110 students, which is ten percent of the student population, has frequent unexcused absences. This ten percent of the school is often referred to as the ten percent factor. Mr. Danielson is here to help not only this percentage, but also the rest of the student body be successful and graduate.
“I’m not here to force you to go to class, I can’t force you to do anything,” Danielson said. “I’m here to help kids be successful and get them out the door and graduated.”
There are multiple ideas Mr. Danielson has about how to improve student attendance, including incorporating incentives for coming to school.
“More pep rallies, more free periods, some different classes or student rewards,” Danielson said. “We did doughnuts a couple times last year for kids who hadn’t missed a class all year, different things like that just to give them some more incentives to come and do the right thing when they’re at school.”
When a student gets an unexcused absence, they have two days to get the absence cleared up. If the absence isn’t cleared up after the two days and a student previously had two or more unexcused absences, the student is assigned detention time, and after a student receives three or more detention hours, they’re ineligible to participate in the variety of extracurricular activities offered at the high school.
“The best thing that Hastings High School has going for them is the variety of activities that we offer, from bowling to swimming to football to band to cheer,” Danielson said.
Giving out detention hours as the punishment for having unexcused absences is something relatively new to the high school. The current policy is actually more lenient than what it has been in the past.
“When I first got here, if you had an unexcused absence after two days, we actually put you down in the ISS room to serve that unexcused,” Danielson said. “Now we just write detentions for that, so we’ve actually loosened up our policies a lot and put it more on the parents and the students to come to class and to come to school.”
Jeff Linden started his first year as HHS principal this school year. Linden mentions there are many downsides to missing school, including that students who have frequent unexcused absences aren’t able to participate in the many activities the school has to offer.
“You don’t learn when you’re not here, so being in school is important,” Linden said. “You know, also in the united school, you miss out on opportunities you may have as well being in different activities or things that you like to be a part of, you have to be here so you can be a part of those things.”
There are a few patterns when it comes to students getting unexcused absences, such as when a student’s open periods are switched to a study hall when they have three or more hours of detention. On an average day, forty to fifty percent of students have an unexcused absence, however most of these absences end up being excused, and only about ten percent typically stay unexcused.
“Study hall would be a big one. If we take their opens away, that’s usually what gets skipped is the study hall, so there are certainly some different patterns with unexcused absences,” Danielson said.
Another pattern with unexcused absences is students skipping particular classes, which is the main cause of students skipping class.
“I would say that would be the number one cause, just kids not being excited to go to a particular class, and then that ends up being a skip,” Danielson said.
There are many reasons why coming to school is important, one reason being that it’s easy to get behind when you miss school, especially if you have frequent unexcused absences.
“When you’re not in school and you’re not learning, that’s when you have poor performance and you get behind and you’re credit deficient and there’s a lot of things that can snowball on it,” Linden said.
Another reason coming to school is important is for students’ lives after high school.
“But if you look at the big picture as far as graduating, as far as going out in the workforce, getting a job, going to college, whatever they choose to do, coming to school is important and that will never change,” Danielson said.
Mr. Linden has a lot in mind about improving student attendance, and he has a specific goal for how he hopes to improve student attendance.
“About ten percent of kids struggle to come to school for lots of different reasons, but my goal is to try to knock that from ten percent down to five percent,” Linden said.
Something Mr. Linden and Mr. Danielson are focusing on to reach this goal is improving the hallway culture, not only on a building level, but also in classrooms by helping and encouraging teachers to create a warm, welcoming environment that students want to come to.
“Mr. Linden’s trying to address our hallway culture, kind of our school spirit… we really believe that if we make the classrooms a little bit more energetic, a little bit more hands-on learning, it just gives some kids some more things to get excited about when they come to school,” Danielson said.
Putting up posters, having pep rallies, and getting on the intercom are all things that Mr. Linden plans to do and is currently doing to work towards improving the school culture.
“I’m still learning some things so hopefully, if there’s some improvements that need to be made, that’s something we can identify and make those changes as we go through this year,” Linden said.
Students enjoying, or at least not dreading coming to school is something Mr. Linden is trying to add to the school culture.
“I think having a school culture where people want to be here, where they enjoy coming to school, it’s not something they dread. That takes time, of course, but I think now there’s been a lot of positive things happening already, but I hope that it will just continue and those things will kind of work themselves out,” Linden said. “I know not all kids enjoy school, but at least not dreading coming would be a good start.”
