1/10/13
In Attendance: Jill Lowe, Shane Ogden, Jim Peacock, Jayne
Hamblin, Thomas Guest, Joyce Smart, Gordon Geddes, Curtis Jenson, Paul Wagner,
Toph Cottle, Donna Starley
Excused: Drew Nielson, Mary Morgan
Shane: We were asked
to go and research interventions that would be similar to what we would have
and also look at attendance.
Paul: I looked at a
couple of affective attendance policies.
There aren’t any magical things, it’s basically giving incentives to
students that come. We have to enforce a
policy. Statistics show that it’s the
enforcement that works. The policy we
have now worked when we enforced it.
Shane: Did you see
any info on the consequence piece?
Paul: Not really,
there were a few athletic exceptions. As
I researched, we would hit a lot of roadblocks because of the precedence that
we have set here. The positive
incentives in Montana they did included students with perfect attendance didn’t
have to take a quarter exam.
Shane: That’s where
many lawsuits come from is schools tying in attendance to a students grade.
Paul: I also saw that
they rented out a theatre for a day, hunting competitions, so recognizing
what’s important to their kids. They
also had parameters set for each tardy, or every action has its consequence
that is reinforced every time. The key
seems to be clarity and reinforcement. I
also saw that Texas had student tracking cards-their ID cards were used to
check in at each door.
I also saw a system that does your attendance for you. This software is called Plasco, and it would
flag attendance for you.
Curtis: I looked at a
school where parents had to excuse absences within the same day. The system would also call all absent
students’ parents at 10am that day if their student hadn’t shown up. Absent students were also not allowed to
participate in any extra-curricular activity that day. I also looked at theory of attendance
policies. It talked about identifying
chronic absences quickly, to help stomp it right away before it got out of
control.
Gordon: Some important
pieces of effective policies include: educating parents about school
requirements, clear definitions, the monitoring, looking at underlying problems
to absenteeism, and including police or child protective services. Studentadvocacy.net
Shane: I also looked
at attendance. I looked at Clark
County. They used a loss of credit
system where so many absences and you lose credit. They have an appeals process and make up
mornings where students can come and make up time. Arlington was another school where they were
sued and now have no policy. They allow
the natural consequences of not showing up for school is usually failing a
class. They were there to teach and not
run kids lives. Washington Lee is
another school that is in the same district that doesn’t have any cameras and
the school is all-inclusive, kids can only get into school in the morning
through the school resource officer.
Lakeridge does a wheel of fortune where the kids get so many punches and
then they can spin the wheel and earn iTunes cards, etc.
Jill: All the
attendance policies that I looked at
Shane: We have been
talking about our information systems.
Today we discussed our two different systems that we use here at
LHS. Pinnacle and SIS. They don’t talk with each other. Pinnacle is inaccurate. Do we want to use only SIS? It is much better than it was with the Internet
interface and parents can use it.
Until we have $300,000, SIS might be the one to use until that happens.
Jayne: I use Pinnacle
at the elementary and I don’t like it.
It’s not accurate there either.
Curtis: Another
thought is using Canvas. We have a
canvas license and it has a grade book.
Shane: I’m worried
about having any two systems talk to each other. Please go back and discuss with people, we aren’t
making any decisions today.
Paul: We also talked
about having a flagging system for our intervention. Clark told us last year that Pinnacle could
do that, and I don’t know if SIS could do that or not.
Jim: I looked at
interventions. They seem to tailor their
system to what they think will work.
They list things like boot camp, special advisory period, etc. I looked at Sky View’s ROCK hour (lunch and
intervention). The teachers are offering
all sorts of different things. Kids
voluntarily choose what they would go to.
I don’t think they have any real hard data on how it’s affecting student
outcome. The problem is their population
is pretty homogenous. That is not the
case here at LHS. I talked with a man
in Mexico and about their educational system.
High School in Mexico is done at 9th grade. It hit me that immigrants coming here from
Mexico, that are on the lower end of the SES scale, those kids are going to
work because in Mexico their high school is over at 9th grade and
their families need them to go work.
Students at MLMS are much more engaged than they are here. But they are the younger students that in
their culture are and should be still in school. MCHS calls theirs the FLEX hour. Students sign up for what they want if they
have a 2.0. They also have study hall
for AP kids. Each teacher is assigned a
certain class or subject during that hour.
I have MC’s pyramid of interventions and each student has to go through
the pyramid. We are just trying to meet
all of our student’s needs. All students
need help in one class or another. We
have talked about wanting a natural incentive, and how it will work during
lunch and opening ala-carte during lunch at other spots around the school. It seems to me that we will need a Para to
help us manage this program. MC has two Para’s
that help with theirs. We need to set
some criteria for Language Arts, Math, and Science and then decide about
enrichment opportunities.
Joyce: The
afterschool Math instruction help that is being provided is very highly
attended. We are finding that so many
students are attending, that we cannot help them all. 15 are about all we can get to.
Jim: If we find a way
to spread out our 10 Math teachers to help more kids. We can get more kids helped.
Shane: We are using
the shotgun approach. We are still
missing the 15% that don’t have any skill.
What we are trying to achieve is going to help the kids that are willing
to get the help and don’t have quite the skill gap that many of the kids have
that aren’t coming to school. They
aren’t the ones we are going to get. We
need our first piece in place and the other will follow.
Joyce: I feel that we
can help the ones that are here and want help, and the other ones hopefully
follow.
Paul: On all things
PLC there is a template to help us know where to start. You can just walk through their website and
has questions to help guide through the process. It might be a good idea to have a template or
a rubric like we used in our last group.
Going blind is kind of scary. We
don’t need to reinvent the wheel. There
have been many schools that have done this before.
Jim: Do we want
something like Sky View has? If we want
to have a Crimson and Gold hour, how do we make it mandatory?
Shane: What if we C1
and G1 and every student is assigned and has a half hour lunch and students can
earn their way out within two weeks when students have some grades or character
ed things happening.
Joyce: The reward has to be high.
Shane: We offered
$100 to pass a test at Rawlins, but students would rather have 20 extra minutes
of lunch because it goes all year long.
Toph: I thing that
most students would really work for an hour-long lunch.
Curtis: We could
also add some other incentives to go along with that.
Shane: Is that a
start? My old students had a ticket that
students would use to go see another teacher or go to lunch. What about every Monday students have to go
see a teacher?
Thomas: The once a
week would be good. You are being
checked on once a week, it’s like meeting with your counselor.
Gordon: If we have
1500 students and have 70 teachers, each teacher could have 21 kids.
Joyce: If we are
trying to teach these kids to be responsible, let’s them have followed what
they should be doing and keep track of.
That way they are taking care of themselves.
Shane: This will only
be as good as the teacher who keeps their grades up. I have a problem with teachers that don’t
enter grades till the end of the term.
Jayne: it’s frustrating, as a parent that my student’s
assignments can sit with their teacher before it gets graded and they have an
F, when they have done the assignment it just doesn’t get graded for a month.
Paul: I am leery of
the logistics. It seems that in my
debate crew there is so much crap paperwork and hoop jumping that wastes time,
it could be so complicated. If it’s
electronic, we are going to have to furnish that. It could be a big shuffling issue.
Shane: You can’t tell
a student to head down to another teacher’s class.
Paul: We saw that at
MC. Most kids were just doing the dance
of goofing around. If we don’t get the
software and database all lined up so all the teacher has to do it click a
button, it won’t work. The secretary at
Lakeridge would compile a list of all the kids who had a flag or if they were
green to go, each student would either get a green or red flag for where they
needed to be. We need a system to take
the paperwork off the teachers. If not,
the students that need help will suffer.
Curtis: Logistically
grading is horrible in English. I spend
all my time grading and I feel like I’m always behind in my grading. We need to change the way we grade, if we
want to keep things updated. I get here
at 6:00 and I’m always behind with grading.
Jayne: If Pinnacle
could not show an F, that would help if it’s just because teachers haven’t put
the grade in.
Toph: Students can
look at their grades and when my mom finalizes her grades, she has a bunch of
students that come in and want to raise their grades.
Shane: It seems that
all things that we saw that was effective, there was always a homeroom or home
base where the teacher prints everything out for student’s to see.
Curtis: If you have
ever seen a student-led-conference that would be ideal. A student-led-parent teacher conference where
kids track their progress and teachers need trained on it.
Paul: Am I
understanding that we don’t have the funds to bulk up our system?
Shane: That’s
correct, we don’t have the funds for that.
We are discussing just using SIS only.
We are talking about setting up intervention time; do we need to set up
steps to this? Three missing assignments
and kids flagged. Maybe tiers that could
shed some light on this?
Paul: like some
criteria?
Shane: Is this the
only thing we are going to do for our kids?
Do we need a pyramid?
Donna: Do we need three different pyramids? Attendance,
Behavior, and Academic?
Jayne: We will need
someone to run those as well.
Paul: Would it be out
of reach to have someone build us a computer program? It would just need to kick out reports of
student with certain grades of lower.
Shane: If it was a stand-alone
system it might work, it just can’t work with another system. SIS isn’t open
with their program. If we want that, it’s
just a barrier.
Jim: Let’s look at
our neighbors and what they are doing.
Donna: Bob and Dave
might come over.
Shane: They feel that
it might work better for us to come to them.
Jim: that might need
to happen before next Monday.
Paul: I feel like
there needs to be a safety net-grade wise.
MC and SV don’t have much set up.
I think we need to go to Lakeridge or Viewmont if we want to see one in
action.
