Morgan Hill and Gilroy school districts are feeling a financial
pinch due to poor student attendance.
Morgan Hill and Gilroy school districts are feeling a financial pinch due to poor student attendance.
Here in Morgan Hill, the number is even more staggering: so far this school year, ADA funds are $600,000 below expectations. In neighboring Gilroy, officials will see at least $337,000 less revenue from the state in average daily attendance funds due to student absences.
Part of the problem is that the state changed the ADA rules a few years ago. It used to be that if a student had an excused absence for illness, the school would receive the ADA money for that student’s day at school. Now, if a student is absent for any reason, the school loses the ADA funds; and those range between $26 and $36 per student per day.
A strong case can be made that withholding ADA funding is unfair to school districts. Public schools must staff, schedule, provide space and buy supplies for every student enrolled, real costs the district incurs whether for each student, whether or not each student comes to school each day. Private schools don’t give a daily tuition discount for student absences, yet public schools are expected to absorb the ADA funding loss that doesn’t come with any commensurate expenditure reduction.
But that’s a battle that will have to be fixed at the state level. In the meantime, our schools must fix the attendance problem locally. We think it’s a huge mistake to look at attendance solely in dollars-and-cents terms. The financial impact, while real and painful, isn’t the most important consequence of poor school attendance. The real problem is that students who aren’t in school aren’t learning.
That has implications that reach wider than that student’s life and farther into the future than this year’s budget crunch. A student who doesn’t learn is more likely to cost taxpayers down the road money in a myriad of ways. A student who doesn’t learn is wasting his potential to improve his own life, the lives of his family, and of those in his community.
Local police are reporting an increase in truancy, and seeing it in children as young as fifth and sixth grades. It’s disturbing to police and us. When police question the parents about their child’s absence, they’re frequently told that junior just didn’t feel like going to school that day, and the parents apparently lack the gumption to send them anyway.
Then there’s last December’s protest in the Latino community. When parents keep their kids home from school to make a political point – many Latino families kept their children home to protest the repeal of a law to give illegal immigrants driver’s licenses – they’re teaching their children that school’s not of paramount importance.
Clearly, this is a problem that calls out for a multi-pronged, multi-agency, carrot-and-stick approach.
We urge the Morgan Hill and Gilroy school districts to find demographically similar districts who’ve successfully confronted attendance problems, study their approaches and copy them. We think a regional approach, involving both school districts, the sheriff’s department and the police departments in Gilroy, Morgan Hill and San Jose, should begin immediately. Representatives of groups that work with troubled families, such as Community Solutions, should be included.
Together, we can find ways to entice kids to go to school, ways to convince them that staying away isn’t worth the cost, and ways to change attitudes in South Valley so we all value school attendance.
And not just for the value it adds to school districts’ coffers.
The school districts need to make increased school attendance and truancy higher priorities even when funding for all school efforts is increasingly difficult.
