The Greenwood Leflore Consolidated School Board approved a new attendance policy allowing each student only two parent-excused absences per semester.
Under the current policy, Superintendent James Johnson-Waldington said, a student may have no more than five absences within a semester, but a majority of those absences are documented as parent-excused. Now the other three of the five absences will still be allowed but will require official documentation from a doctor or other entity to ensure they are marked as excused absences.
“(State) funding is based on the average attendance of students in the district,” the superintendent said, “and in order to ensure our students are receiving the proper amount of funding, an attendance regulation would be enacted Jan. 4, 2023.”
The district asked for a waiver for funding for the 2023-24 school year for the Mississippi Department of Education to consider attendance numbers from 2019 due to lower numbers in the past several years. The waiver request is allowed to provide schools with funding when attendance has been lower due to circumstances such as the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We did not have anything in policy as far as a board-approved regulation, and when they do get turned in and go to court, sometimes they’re able to turn those into records for an excuse, which gets them out of trouble,” Johnson-Waldington said.
Johnson-Waldington said the district was aiming to lay out what was expected of the students regarding attendance and give them an incentive to come to school.
The superintendent said when he compared absence numbers from this year and last year, the district’s absences increased by about 3 percentage points.
“We do not have a lot of students who have unexcused absences, (but) they were receiving excuses from someone, which was being recorded properly by the district but harms our (state funding) as far as absences go,” he said.
In the same meeting, the board also:
- Approved paying out the rest of $3.5 million in ESSER I money for projects before the Dec. 31 deadline. The money was provided by the federal government as part of COVID-19 relief for infrastructure and health needs.
- Voted in executive session to hire Nate Armistead as facilitator for a Dec. 16 public hearing, to be held in the board’s regular meeting room, and to institute a public hearing officer at that hearing.
- Discussed the superintendent’s contract.
- Contact Katherine Parker at 662-581-7239 or kparker@gwcommonwealth.com.
The original version of this article incorrectly reported the decision made by the school board in its executive session.
