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David Nunez, left, and Zack Daher raise their hands to answer a question while sitting next to the empty desks of two absent students in Dorothy Schroeder's fourth-grade class at Taylor Mountain Elementary School, in Santa Rosa, on Wednesday. CHRISTOPHER CHUNG/PD
By KERRY BENEFIELD
THE PRESS DEMOCRAT
Cotati-Rohnert Park School District loses $1.5 million a year because of student absenteeism — a figure greater than what district saved by shuttering Mountain Shadows Middle School in the spring and cutting five classroom days from the current school year.
As districts across Sonoma County scramble to make ends meet with approximately 25 percent less funding from Sacramento than they received three years ago, officials are turning a sharp focus on attendance rates that are tied to state funding.
Back-to-school newsletters and parent-night talks are highlighting the link between a child’s attendance and the approximately $30 that a district typically gets for each day the student is at school.
The numbers add up and the stakes are high.
In Santa Rosa City Schools, a 1 percent swing in attendance has an impact of almost $920,000 on the annual budget, according to staff. In 2008-09, when district officials ignited a daily attendance push, revenue jumped by $884,000.
Cotati-Rohnert Park, which maintains a 95 percent attendance rate across all of its campuses, is developing programs to increase the number of students in seats on elementary campuses.
“It’s huge,” said Wade Roach, chief financial officer for Cotati-Rohnert Park, Sonoma County’s third-largest district, said of the money associated with even slight fluctuations in attendance.
Districts even lose money when students are out sick — bad news when clustered cases of H1N1 or whooping cough hit campuses.
In the late 1990s, the state education code was changed to increase the district’s daily allotment per student in class, but it ended the policy of doling out money for students who were home ill with an excused absence.
“No absence generates attendance credit,” said Kim Clement, fiscal consultant for the California Department of Education.
The only way for districts to collect money for an absent student is to create an independent study package of work that is due the day of the student’s return. The work must be the same in rigor and content as what the student missed.
In public schools, only an absence of five consecutive days can be covered by independent study work. The threshold is one day for charter schools, Clement said.
In the Bellevue District, Superintendent Tony Roehrick has promised to evenly share new revenues with the district’s four campuses if there is an increase in their individual attendance rates.
The difference between the campus with the best attendance rate and the school with the worst in that district was less than 2 percent last year, but that spread represented $58,600 in lost money, Roehrick said.
Roehrick is asking campuses to reduce their absentee rate by 25 percent. For a school with an absentee rate of almost 6 percent that means increasing attendance by 1.4 percent, which translates to about $35,000 in increased revenue, he said.
“If they meet that target, the district said … ‘You get half of that additional revenue for discretional use,’ ” he said.
For Elizabeth Sesma-Olinyk, the principal at Taylor Mountain Elementary, much of the push is getting through to parents the message that every day counts — both for the district’s coffers and for the student’s educational experience.
“You are not helping your child when you cave into your child and they are crying because they don’t want to come to school because it’s hard,” she said. “We are responsible for making enormous amounts of progress with these students and if the child is not in school we cannot support that child in making that progress.”
But the push by school districts is being felt outside of school campuses and some say it’s gone too far.
Parents are feeling pressure not only to abandon a mid-year trip to Disneyland but also to squeeze their children’s doctors, dentist and other appointments into a 3 p.m.-5 p.m. window.
“I’m hearing it from many, many parents,” said pediatric dentist Stephen Berger of Santa Rosa. “Parents are saying they can’t take their kids out of school because of all of the pressure from the school.”
Another parent, who has had three students in Santa Rosa City Schools, said the tenor changed about five years ago when it became increasingly difficult to get a student out for any reason.
Students are scared of getting behind and teachers are often unwilling to guide them on missed assignments, the woman said. She did not want her name used for fear of repercussion for her youngest child who is still attending a local high school.
But Roehrick said parents need to weigh not only the collective cost to the districts when students miss class unnecessarily, but also what the student misses academic and socially.
A family vacation might be a bonding experience and easier outside of the jam-packed summer, but that has to be considered in context of the current budgetary climate, he said.
“Especially today, where we are right now with five fewer school days,” he said. “All I would say is that you really have to look closely at the value a student is getting and what they are going to be missing. Is a ski weekend a unique enough experience that a child will never have again?”
Staff writer Kerry Benefield writes an education blog at extracredit.blogs.pressdemocrat.com.
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@a former teacher
As a current teacher, I think you’re wrong. Yes, many Mexican families go to Mexico and miss a week or two in December. But there are even more kids who take ski weeks, or whose families decide it’s better to take the family vacation after the crowds have thinned out. I have too many students out right now on independent study because they’re on vacation, and school has just started!
I am dismayed by the quality of reporting shown here: “Students are scared of getting behind and teachers are often unwilling to guide them on missed assignments, the woman said. She did not want her name used for fear of repercussion for her youngest child who is still attending a local high school.”
We, the public, are supposed to believe that teachers are bad because they don’t bother to help their students, and this is based on hearsay because no one will go on record? Could it possibly be that teachers are working their hearts out, spending their own money, because they care about our children (they know each of them), and simply do not have any more time or energy left to do more?
Shame on you, Press Democrat, for perpetuating such an attitude of resentment against teachers, and for such shoddy reporting. You could have supported education instead of trying to quash it.
I don’t think the problem is parents taking little Billy out of school to take his skiing lesson at Alpine. The problem has more to do with the new non-English speaking parents not seeing education as important and valuable as Billy’s parents. Sad but true.
But attendance is everything. The school districts can keep asking why and never address the issue. Many in the minority community do not see the value in sending their kids to school.
I hope people will consider not “trusting” Todd in that he could stand to spend some time in a public school these days, to brush up on his grammar. I think if attendance data were examined, it would show that a growing problem that leads to a lack of success for many students is the increasing rate of absences from class.
@Maher If you home school your children, you could be together a lot more. Get rid of the “PC nonsense” and do it ourself.
Thank you Kerry for bringing this important issue forward. As you report, we are funded by the amount of students who show up. It is a double whammy for us in that we lose money and we have to spend additional time and resources to catch those students up.
Obviously, students who are sick or injured shouldn’t come to class, that is not the real problem. It is all the students who cut classes or families who take mid year vacations that exacerbate the situation.
And I would in turn ask Mr Roerick: Is a school year that entails upwards of 30% of my child’s time and energy being completely wasted something that’s about education, or is it about the money? Just for fun, pull your child’s teacher aside sometime and ask them to give you an honest assessment of how much of each hour goes into learning vs how much goes into simply corralling 35 kids in order to get them ready to learn, or maybe all the PC nonsense that now passes for education. If the teacher is being honest, you might be surprised. I’ll take the opportunity to spend time together as a family any day.
What is the point of this “story”? Yes kids get sick and schools dont get paid when the childs not there. There has always been and always will be a certain percentage absent. I’m sure the schools didn’t figure there budget based on 100% attendance…right..?
Articles like this is why I canceled my subscription to the PD and rarely read it online. Maybe they could have saved money by not spending money on some construction projects that did not need to be done….I know..trust me..”If we don’t spend all the money we won’t get an increase next year” Vote em out in Nov>.