The attendance numbers, just like the rest of the statistics that BCPSS gives, are manipulated or flat out changed to make things appear better than they actually are. They used to announce bogus attendance rates at my school every afternoon. They eventually stopped because everyone knew what a joke it was.

I know it would be hard to do but I would love to see the correlation between all the complaints including altered attendance numbers and some of the (sorry ahead of time) old time, power hungry,how things look,in the box thinking administrators. I have had only a couple administrators and they are some of the most ethical, creative, hard working servant leaders I know. However, I have also had experience with downright corrupt administration. We need to be careful about making comments about the system vs individual schools.

There are 6 children on my homeroom roster that I know either attend another school in Baltimore City or the county. Every day I mark these children absent, and every day when I get the attendance roster back, my marks have been erased.
When I approached the office staff about it, they gave me some line about how we have to keep marking them present because we know they are still in the system.
Does that make sense to anyone?

Could phathom students be the new method to raise additional funding under the Fair Student Funding Model???

My girls lacrosse game with DH this past Friday was cancelled because not enough of the girls were present. If that doesn't say something about the culture of that particular group of students, then I don't know what else could.

Schools must make dilegent effort in locating a student who is on the roll but not in attendance at their school.
This includes: letters, phone calls and home visit to the address that the school has on file.
Once this is done they can go into SASI to exit the student from the school, if the student is a special ed student the same rules apply but the IEP team must have an exit meeting before exiting the student and the code used for SASI must match what
MD Online has.
Being able to accurately monitor attendance will continue to be a problem if 1. The schools do not do
their part. 2. Schools were not being allowed to knowingly fudge the attendance to make it appear as if they have no problems. 3. Parents were not constantly moving and/or changing the childs schools.
Also this is going to be an even bigger issue in the coming months and in the new school year due to all the closings that are happening.
Our parents are having less of a choice as to a good school that is within a childs travel time, academics, violence in the schools etc.
This has been a major issue this year and parents have been going from city to county from one school to another.
Since the CEO let the Principals have more control over their schools, we will continue to see more fudging of attendance.