NICK GOSNELL
Hutch Post
HUTCHINSON, Kan. — Haven USD 312 is giving some statistics on attendance as school gets started this fall, to help kids stay on track.
"It starts with just getting kids into the building, and our chronic absentee rate has dropped over the last few years as we've kind of got further away on this side of COVID, and so we're down at like 12 and a half percent, but we certainly wanna keep dropping that," said USD 312 Superintendent Craig Idacavage. "Just sharing stuff with parents and helping educate our stakeholders."
Chronic absenteeism, as defined by the Department of Ed, is gone more than 10% of the time.
"For our kids, it's about 16 days, our kids go about 166 days, kind of depends on what happens with the snow in the winter, but so that's about 16 days that makes up that 10%," Idacavage said. "We've had that talk as an admin team too, you know, about, we don't need to get out of school for haircuts and things like that, you know, during COVID and, you know, the time after, when you were sick, we encouraged kids to stay home and now if maybe if you have a headache, you can come and do those things and kind of getting back to the times before. Making sure that we know it's important to be there."
Parents are notified if their kids aren't in school and they haven't heard from them.
"We just kind of see that at the high school level where our call will go out, letting parents know that kids weren't in first hour and they're not aware of it because they're, you know, high school kids, some of those are responsible for getting themselves to school," Idacavage said. "Keeping that line of communication open with parents and working together to make sure those kids are in school."
If you have attendance questions, call your child's school.