As most students’ minds have already checked out for the summer, we are left to ponder this last school year. We’ve survived another year and you have helped make a difference in the lives of more students.
Now is the time for our proverbial “new school year resolutions.” How will next year be different? How will we make a difference and empower the students that occupy our schools? How will we impress upon them the desire for knowledge, the capacity to learn, and the ability to reason? Well, the first step is getting them in the classroom. How will we get our students to attend class?
Student attendance is important no matter the school. Every institute earns government funding based on attendance and enrollment, which is affected by whether or not a student attends class or drops out. Absences are strong predictors in a student’s educational career, and is what helps identify potential drop-out students. No matter how schools earn funding, if a student does not attend class, they will not learn and become contributors to society.
Everyone toots the same horn where student absences are concerned. It’s always the same doom and gloom ending. We focus a lot on the end result of excessive student absences because it is truly a tragedy. Some drop-outs are able to recover their life and fix their mistakes. Yet many do not. I would like to tie this in to a research paper recently released by ParentLink. In this, we discuss the causes of student absence, who can make a difference in each student’s life, and how you can make that difference.
High school dropouts, on average, earn “$9,200 less per year than high school graduates” (Dunsworth and Billings 136). In addition to fi nancial repercussions, the societal costs likewise add up. For example:
- “Over the course of his or her lifetime, a high school dropout earns, on average, about $260,000 less than a high school graduate.
- If the male graduation rate were increased by only 5 percent, the nation would see an annual savings of $8 billion in crime-related costs.
- Dropouts from the class of 2008 alone will cost the nation more than $319 billion in lost wages over the course of their lifetimes.”
(Alliance for Excellent Education 1)
This next year you can make more of a difference. In order to “cure” we must first understand. Download the full white paper here and learn how you can continue winning ground on the fight against student absences.
