Jackson Co School Director Voices Concern About Attendance Rates

Attendance rates of Jackson County students a major concern for Director of Schools Kristy Brown.

Brown reported that 17.6 percent of students missed at least 10 percent of instruction time last school year. Brown said the chronic out of school rate is unacceptable.

“That’s concerning when we have that many students that is missing three to four weeks of school a year and sometimes more,” Brown said. “That is going to be an area that we make goals around improving.”

Brown said providing more resources to families and utilizing policies in place will be strategies to combat the absenteeism. Brown said the system had more students chronically out of school last year compared to the COVID pandemic time frame.

“I realize that at the beginning of last school year we still had a good number of quarantines and isolations going on,” Brown said. “But yes, we had more students out last school year than the prior year. That is something that we definitely want to improve.”

Brown said excused absences such as sickness are counted, so in some cases, students had legitimate reasons for the absences. Brown said she wants to message that students cannot learn as much if they are not present.

“I wanted to bring it to the attention of our board,” Brown said. “We basically want to have resources in place for families. There may be reasons that this is happening and use policies and procedures we have in place. I students can’t learn as much if they are not here.”