When the first month of the 2023-2024 school year was about to conclude at Hastings Senior High, Principal Jeff Linden shared his goals and expectations for the students on August 30, 2023.
There are multiple goals Linden would like to see accomplished this school year to encourage students to keep doing their best after the first month of school. These goals are to better the student body, set an objective for the students to follow as motivation, and improve the school atmosphere to create an enhanced learning environment.
“We want to increase attendance, we want to decrease chronic absenteeism, we want to increase testing scores, and we want to decrease discipline issues,” Linden said.
Changes had been implemented at Hastings Senior High to increase attendance rates in the form of hall monitors to ensure that students are not absent from their classes and a phone policy designed to help students focus on learning. Linden also wanted to focus on creating a warmer environment where students are able to be comfortable.
“I don’t think they’re huge changes, I think they’re pretty small, but I think they’ll impact our student learning and attendance in a big way,” Linden said.
Student morale is also a topic that Linden believed to have improved. Linden observed that more students had said that they enjoy school during their conversations this year than the conversations he had with students last year.
“I think it’s just building that community of tiger pride that’s important,” Linden said.
Linden hoped to continue in this direction with a steady increase in student morale and encouraged students to support one another and involve themselves in student activities to help with morale. Another change that was made with student morale in mind is what used to be an area for storage being transformed into a functional lounge area for the students.
Chronic absenteeism is when a student does not attend ten percent of the days of school they are assigned.
The percentage of chronic absenteeism at Hastings Senior High was 35.5 percent during the 2022-2023 school year with an attendance rate of about 86 percent. This was a decrease of chronic absenteeism in comparison to the 2021-2022 school year where the percentage was at 45 percent.
Attendance rates had increased since then. For the first month of the 2023-2024 school year, preliminary data showed an attendance rate of 91 percent on average with chronic absenteeism data not yet available.
The preliminary data represented a positive trend in attendance and is projected to increase as time goes on this year.
“I would encourage them to continue coming to school, work hard, find something they love in the school, plug themselves in, be a part of something bigger than themselves, and be one percent better everyday,” Linden said.
