About 40 Rochester
school district and city officials, including Mayor Tom Richards, fanned out in
city neighborhoods this morning, searching for absentee students.
In groups of
two and three, they knocked on doors in search of about 120 students who have missed
10 to 20 days this school year, said Patricia Malgieri, the district’s chief of
staff. This morning’s effort concentrated mostly on students in kindergarten to
third grade, and East and Charlotte high schools, where attendance is among the
worst in the district.
Officials
are also concentrating on students who are at least attending school part time,
and are not complete no-shows.
“We’ve got to
start someplace and this is as good a basis to start with as any,” Richards
said, echoing Superintendent Bolgen Vargas’s concern that low attendance is
directly related to low student achievement. And the problem starts in the
lower grades and progresses.
About 35
percent of Charlotte High School students are not coming to school on any given
day, Vargas said.
Vargas’s began
his push to address the district’s attendance problem last year. Thousands of
city students are not attending school regularly, he said.
This article appears in Oct 24-30, 2012.
Why are teachers doing this? Why aren’t parents grabbing their kids by the ear and dragging them to school? At some point the blame has to go to the parents!
I’m sure this is because the schools are underfunded.
Did this district really expect Vargas to be effective? It’s really shameful! Anybody can’t do this job, as some would have us believe. What’s even worse is that it is humanly impossible for Vargas to do it. Over the past 20 years he has done “nothing” to prepare himself for what he has been appointed to do. Those who supported him (BB) are certainly getting a return on their investment.
“One thing is for certain is that, if you create programs that interest students and meet them where they are, then you won’t need to go knocking on their doors because they will be knocking on yours!” Josh J. Mack