For all you students who rush home after school to delete the attendance message on your answering machine, I’m sorry to announce that you can hide no longer.
Starting Monday March 18, Fairfax County added another daily phone call and email to inform parents of their child’s attendance that will go out around 10 am.
In the past, the attendance office sent out the call and email around 6pm, but this allowed students go home after school and delete the message, leaving parents clueless to the student’s lack of attendance.
I strongly agree with this new attendance policy for many reasons. First, it will give teachers more reason to give accurate attendance on their first period class which would be much different than the current situation in which my first period teacher rarely takes attendance. To be honest, most of my teachers do not take attendance, which allows many of my classmates to skip class and never get caught.
Another reason I agree with this new process is regarding the safety of students. If a student gets kidnapped, while they are walking to school for example, no one, especially their parents, will know until the end of the day. If a parent knows a student went to school and suddenly they get a call saying their student was not in their first period class they will know something is wrong.
This new policy will not only enforce safety, but it will persuade students to make good choices. Recently, many students received consequences for skipping school to go get free pancakes at IHOP. A more frequent issue also includes students skipping various classes to walk to Ossian in order to partake in illegal activity. This process will now inform parents sooner of their children’s whereabouts and will keep more students away from the church, and in their classes.
Although this new policy is also very beneficial to AHS, there are also some issues. If students have a reason they are not in class on time, such as talking to another teacher or their counselor, their first period teacher will mark them absent. When the parents get the phone call in the morning saying their child was absent, this could cause confusion and worry within the parents. Mistakes such as these are likely to occur, and could amount in unnecessary concern.
Overall, this new attendance policy will steer students in the right direction. It will inform parents about their students locations and will prevent students from having the ability to skip. With this new policy set in place, something tells me that the number of students in the hallways will be increased.
