Like all school districts in Texas, Taylor Independent School District’s state funding is based on its average daily attendance rates, and the district continues to try and maximize those numbers for this school year.
At the regular meeting April 17, Superintendent Devin Padavil gave an update to trustees on the district’s measures they are taking to increase attendance, which has risen slightly since last March, from 92.75% to 92.98%.
“Normally in a school year, what you would see is in the second semester is attendance is dropping, and we have made it through the middle of the year, and it’s actually a little bit on the rise to where we expect it to be,” Padavil said.
At the meeting, Padavil shared the different policies the schools have been implementing to increase attendance, including calling parents, sending out truancy letters, filing truancy charges when a student has three or more unexcused absences, conducting home visits and running daily attendance reports.
In particular, high school freshman and kindergarteners have been targeted, as those grades have the worst attendance, Padavil said.
“I know we actually brought in most of our principals for an attendance meeting, and they came prepped with their list of who some of those families are, and what their daily routines are, to make sure they are at school when the day starts, and to see if we could get them there by the attendance period (of 10 a.m.),” Padavil said.
Trustee Shorty Mitchell said he did not expect kindergarteners to have among the worst attendance rates.
“I am surprised there are students like that,” Mitchell said. “The school is like an unpaid daycare for some of these parents at that age. I am surprised to hear that they miss a lot.”
But Andy Basche, the principal of TH Johnson Elementary School, whose campus has hovered at a 90 percent attendance rate since January, said the issue has been difficult.
“It has been a real struggle this year,” Basche said. “We have worked with checking on students. We have a list of students who are chronically absent we go classroom by classroom seeing if they are there or not there, we go back to our office early in the morning with the registrar, and if they are not present, we are calling the parents on the phone. We are starting early, so we can make that happen. We are trying to create a sense of urgency, just letting them know, ‘Hey, your child does need to be in school. Can you possibly get them here before ten o’clock?”
Board President Marco Ortiz said he hoped the district would keep trying to innovate to address this issue.
“If it’s still that same percentage at the end of the year, maybe it’s time to do something else because again I know for ADA (average daily attendance) is important (for funding), but more importantly, it is the instructional time that students are missing from not being in class,” Ortiz said.
Padavil said changing the culture of the schools is one way that principals can address the issue.
“I think Legacy (Early College High School) is a great example of turning around attendance at a school,” Padavil said. “Last year at this time, they were at 90 percent, and now they are at 95, and so they made a huge difference by creating a culture where students feel a huge sense of belonging.”
