Absenteeism costs More than grades at stake when it comes to attendance By Nader Ihmoud
Lane Technical High School Graduate
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lbert Lane Technical High School took a hard look at its attendance numbers and administrators saw room for improvement. More than just its standing among academic rivals in the city is at stake. Five years ago, the principal sat down with 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 fewer days of school. Antoinette LoBosco, the current principal, remembers the reason behind the change. “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 the following school year.
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Lane Tech was among selective enrollment high schools—where admission requires an application and entrance exam—in the Chicago Public Schools system that had to come up with a plan. It competes for enrollees, resources and bragging rights with schools such as 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 magazine, 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,
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10/13/10 11:08 AM