001Welcome USD264 uh stakeholders, parents, community, staff, and anyone watching on YouTube. Just want to bring our first update of the year to you. Um this is volume 20. So we're starting our third year kind of conducting these updates to make sure that we can work on our communication and provide uh good, consistent, and clear communication. So this is our first one for the 2526 school year. Uh we're hoping everyone had a great start to the school year. We're coming up just completing our second full week of school. um it's hard to imagine how fast it's gone, but also how fast it's going to go uh as we get started. So, in thinking about that, our focus for this month is we're going to really just revisit our chronic absenteeism. Uh some of the work that
002we were focusing on last year as a board goal was reducing that chronic absenteeism, uh which should increase student achievement, which is strategic plan goal number one. And then also making sure that we provide that consistent, relevant communication through all of our processes, uh for you during that. Um, so we want to make sure that we're clarifying that process today and that we make sure that we're also going to celebrate the success that we had uh last year uh with some of our work there. So part of our why the state is focusing in on attention uh attendance. I think if you've seen a lot of things pushed out by KSDE over the past couple years is realizing that as we came back from COVID attendance had a way of uh not having the same
003importance as it was before uh and that we also were making sure that we were getting everyone healthy. uh as we kind of have moved past that and that is now a thing in the past, we're really wanting to make sure that we can focus on those students that miss more than 10% um become chronically absent. What are they actually missing when they're at school? And then really looking at the difference of the correlation between student attendance and student achievement. What we do know through research is that when students are in school more, they achieve more. Uh when they're in front of the expert, the teacher that they get to work with each and every day, they're going to learn more. And so we really wanted to make sure that we understood what chronic absenteeism
004is and how is it measured and kind of why is it a focus and then how are we going to actually work on this and how have we worked on this at USC264 over the past year. One parent communication. So we started increasing our parent communication and again we also as a district know that probably when we were rolling this out a year ago we didn't know what we didn't know at the time and part of that was just making sure that parents understood the communication that was coming home and why it was coming home. So again, we're putting this out now so as we get ready to start looking at our attendance again for this year, uh we can really communicate with the parents as to the why uh we're doing what we're doing.
005We also kind of created some student incentive awards. So if you paid attention through social media last year or talked with some of your students, you saw things such as principal Door Dash uh that the high school participated in where a student was a monthly winner and they got to pick a lunch for them and uh four of their friends where Mr. Mr. Clevener or Mr. Cooper from the high school went into town, went into Witchdaw and grabbed them whatever lunch they wanted. Um, and the way that they achieved that is that they had went to school for one full week without missing a day, without missing a period. Their name got put into a drawing. Uh, at Sims at the intermediate middle school, they had their principles 100, so they had drawings every day.
006Uh, and you could receive an award if you were there on that day. As well as they also produced a incentive for students that had perfect attendance. So at the end of the school year um they took a group of students to Dave and Busters for the day. Um Dave and Busters also participated in giving some uh prizes away to those students that did it. And then finally we started working on that we have what's called a beel team which is behavior social emotional learning. We have a team in each building and that building uh each team in that building also started working on their opportunities to intervene with students who are missing kind of figuring out why having those conversations making sure if it was where they did not feel safe that we were
007provided those opportunities. And I'd be remiss if I forgot when we were on this slide some of the work that the elementary school did. Um they also had random acts of attendance meaning on certain days they would just surprise everyone and give like a popsicle or something like that for being in school on attendance. They also had monthly winners that they awarded um in doing that uh to provide that incentive to do there. And then when so some of the communication that's going to be coming home just so that we can review after students miss three days there'll be a letter coming home from the school uh from the school principal to the parent just letting them know that they've missed three days in one semester. Uh the reason why we send the letter three
008days is it's just a heads up. There is nothing that is saying hey something's wrong. We've done something wrong. We're doing something bad. We're just wanting to say, "Hey, you've hit three days." We want you to be aware that your son or daughter um or your guardian or your student that you have guardianship of has has missed three days. When we get to 5 days missed in a semester, then you'll receive a phone call from the office just stating again, hey, we've got five days. Is there anything going on that we need to know about? Is there things happening that we can help support? And then once we miss seven days in a semester, which is would end up being about half or about 5% of uh missing for the entire year, there'll be a
009conference with the administration. Again, that resets it semester. And those are just as communication tools uh so that we can open up the two-way communication between uh being at home and at school to kind of figure out how we can problem solve and and work together on these uh issues of students not attending school. And then we really wanted to move in before we closed out today's uh um video is with our celebrations. So while we harp on the idea that coming to school is important, we realize that there was a lot of great work that was done not only by the teachers uh but by also by the parents and the students in coming to school last year so we can have the opportunity to kind of celebrate. And really when we look at
010starting off at CEW in the 23 24 school year, their chronic absenteeism rate was very very close to 18% 17.79 and they reduced that to 10.41% just in one year. So a 7.3% reduction in chronically absent students. Again, that's measuring the amount of students that were missing more than 10% of the school days, which would have been more than 16 days last year. So we only had 10% of the student body miss more than 16 days last year. And when you look at each grade level, we'd really like to just shout out to those parents and the students of first grade. Only 5.26% of first grade was chronically absent last year. That's a great accomplishment to making sure students are getting there and being prepared every day for that. And as we jump into CIMS,
011we like to really point out that there was a dramatic jump, almost an 11% uh drop in the students that were chronically absent from a quarter from 25% of our students to 14.8% with us beating the state average by 2%. That is a great accomplishment again to be able to celebrate a reduction of 11% which in that case is about 42 students at CIMS. We have a little over 400 almost 412 students at CIMS last year. And so for 10% to um 10% of them to be less uh chronically absent, that's about 41 students that were now in school at least 90% of the time. So that's a great accomplishment. And you can see the grade levels there. Had some great grade levels, but fourth and seventh grade really did a great job of being
012close to right around 10%. And then here finally celebrating at the high school where we know high school attendance is where it becomes a little bit more of a problem where students have the opportunity to get themselves to school and so it's a little harder to monitor at times. But we reduced our chronic absenteeism from 33.6% to 18.7 a 15% reduction in the amount of students that were chronically absent. And I'd like to really point out there our 12th grade students it was only 13.58% of the students were chronically absent last year. That was a real kudos to that senior class in helping that. And as you can see, we killed the state average by almost 9% uh in that reduction last year. So, we are really, really excited for those numbers and we're really
013excited about those opportunities that our students had by coming to school next year. We want to continue to get better uh get two to 3% better in each building again this year with our chronically absent students because we know when they're there going to be uh higher chance of being successful not only academically but also in their post-secary effectiveness uh opportunities. Then finally, we just want to kind of share what our theme is for this year. So it's be in the arena. It's all based off of uh uh Teddy Roosevelt's uh speech called in the arena. And it's really that idea of when we are one team, one family, one district, we're in the arena together and we're supporting each other and lifting each other up through the good times and through the bad times.
014And as always, if you want to reach out, uh, here's contact information. You reach out and, um, let us know if you have any questions or concerns. And also, please follow us on our social media. And please follow us on, um, the school's Facebook page where you can check out the Friday photo dump. Also, interesting stats and information that we share each and every time. So, thank you for listening into this and we'll see you next month.