Indiana Focused More on Connection Than Attendance
May 3, 2020
“Attendance is now one of the many facets of K-12 education that has been redefined because of the coronavirus pandemic, which has forced school buildings to close and most students to transition to online learning,” writes Allie Kirkman. The reality is, argues Kirkman, that no school districts in the state “are required to bother with strict attendance policies at all.” Instead, “school leaders are emphasizing leniency and teacher-student interactions in their continuous learning plans as a way to track district achievement and attendance.” The Every Student Succeeds Act “requires states to report chronic absence data as a measure of school quality,” but the U.S. Department of Education “has indicated it would ‘consider a one-year waiver to exclude this indicator’ from states’ systems.”