Present and accounted for

By Nader Ihmoud
Lane Technical High School

Albert Lane Technical High School took a hard look at its attendance numbers and administrators saw room for improvement. Plus more than just its standing among academic rivals in the city is at stake.

Five years ago, the principal sat down faculty and others to determine a course of action on how to nudge up the attendance figure that was stuck at around 92 percent at the Chicago college prep institution, where each percentage increase means about 40 more students showing up for classes.

In the middle of the first grading semester of the 2004-2005 school year, Lane Tech decided to crackdown on absenteeism by implementing a policy that linked attendance with grades to motivate students to miss less days of school. Antoinette LoBosco, the current principal, remembers the reason behind the change.

A guide: Don't be absent-minded

The Lane Tech administration, like officials at other schools, understands that personal emergencies and other situations are going to occur to prevent some students from attending all 180 days of the school year.

For those teens at the high school and others in Chicago, it is wise to know the rules to avoid frustration and unnecessary complications. Many schools have the information available at their Web site. But here is a quick guide:

An excused absence is not counted against the student.

Acceptable excuses include a death in the immediate family, illness, religious holidays and college visitations.

A student is required to notify the school on the day of his absence by having a parent call the teen's division teacher or the student can provide a note from his guardian to school authorities.

Each teacher must sign the absence note, which will end up with the division teacher.

An automated message via phone call is sent to the home of the absent student in all cases.

Missing one to four classes in a school day is considered a half day's absence.

Chicago Public Schools policy requires 301 minutes of attendance each day for a student to get marked for a full day of school.

Three or more consecutive absent days require a student to report to the attendance office with a parent and documentation to explain the absences.

Once a student reaches 18 unexcused absences in any of his core classes, he will fail to pass that class or even graduate. But a student can do a make-up in summer school.

–Nader Ihmoud

“We changed it because it seemed like we could not seem to get past the 92 percent attendance rate,” said LoBosco, who was an assistant principal at the North Side school when the effort was discussed and undertaken.

“When we started looking at the reasons for absences, they were not really illnesses,” she said. “They were more like 'I did not feel like going [to school] today.' ”

The result?

“The very first semester [the] attendance rate shot up,” LoBosco said in May.

Another motivation was a requirement in 2006 from district headquarters that a principal whose student attendance rate was below 95 percent had to develop an “attendance improvement plan” that was to take effect in the following school year.

Lane Tech was among selective enrollment high schools--where admission requires an application and entrance examine – in the Chicago Public Schools system that had to come up with a plan. It competes for enrollees, resources and bragging rights with the likes of Whitney Young Magnet, Walter Payton College Prep, Martin Luther King College Prep, Lindblom Math and Science Academy and Westinghouse, the newest, opening in 2009.

However, bragging rights in sports and academic prowess isn't the only thing at stake. The district's overall attendance figure – an average of 85 percent pooling all high schools in 2009 – affects how much state and federal funding it receives. For the individual school, a budget crunch along with poor attendance and low enrollment can lead to the loss of teaching jobs or worse.

Chicago's CBS affiliate, WBBM-TV, recently reported allegations by former school staff members of “ghost students” and attendance tampering in the past three years at two city high schools, Best Practice and Steinmetz Academic Centre.

A CPS spokesman told Channel 2 reporter Dave Savini that an inspector general investigation was looking into the matter and that new tools were being used to better track the possible manipulation of attendance and grades.

The nation's third largest school system, which had an operating budget of $5 billion in the 2009-2010 academic year, has a lot riding on an honest accounting. Its Department of Compliance and Former Student Records, whose duties include tracking and helping to maintain attendance records, announced that more than $1 billion in state funding was secured based on student attendance data for the entire district, which consists of 606 schools, including 122 high schools, and more than 408,000 students in 2009.

The selective enrollment schools get a good share of CPS funding. Catalyst, which covers urban school issues, did a breakdown of a 2005 CPS financial report and found that Lane Tech was budgeted to receive $18.5 million for its huge student population, the largest of the selective enrollment schools. Whitney Young, whose student body was about half of Lane Tech's that year, was scheduled to get the next highest amount, nearly $9 million. The others, with smaller enrollments, got between $1.8 million and $4.6 million.

So district and school leaders have emphasized maximum student attendance and minimum truancy – absent without a valid reason – because of the effect on their funding.

In 2008 the compliance department reported Lane Tech's truancy rate at 0.1 percent for its 4,088 students. Payton shared the same percentage for its 890 students. King, Gwendolyn Brooks College Prep Academy and Northside College Prep all had rates of 0.4 percent for 899, 729 and 1,112 students, respectively. Lindblom, Whitney Young and Jones College Prep registered no truancies for their 484, 2,185 and 707 enrollees, respectively, that year.

Lane Tech's attendance policy discourages no-shows through a shock-and-awe approach. The shock comes after five unexcused absences, and the awe is delivered with a student's semester grades being lowered by one grade letter in each class.

The Leadership Team, comprising of in-house administrators, agreed to the new policy. Its 10 members meet before the beginning of each school year to go over the code of conduct for students, adding and adjusting rules as necessary.

But senior Michael Monroe thinks the school should rely more on the judgment of teachers.

"I understand they [the Leadership Team] are qualified, but they are not in the classroom," he said. "It should be the teacher in the classroom that makes that decision.

"Just because you miss five days doesn't mean you don't know the material," Monroe added.

Lane Tech has a strict attendance policy not only because of district rules, but also it is a college prep school. One school official says it lets students know how things are at higher levels of education.

"In college, after a certain amount of missed classes, the instructor may drop a student, and there are no refunds,“ Christopher Wendorf, assistant attendance director, said about such costly missteps.

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