Attendance has become a priority for many schools. For example, Indiana legislators passed Senate Bill 292 which addresses chronic absenteeism. Although this law doesn’t specifically address issues for high school attendance, this year, school administration has passed new policies regarding attendance that can be found in the student handbook. According to Assistant Principal Brittany Wiseman, there are two main changes occurring.

“We actually now have a program that we have with the prosecutors office in Hamilton County. Essentially, if a student is consistently absent at school then we have to alert the prosecutor’s office,” Wiseman said. “The purpose of doing that is to make sure that we are providing the appropriate support for the student and the families.”

Wiseman said if a student misses 10 full school days, then they will be reported to the prosecutors office. 

The second change involves using Canvas. Wiseman said during Covid, students began taking advantage of Canvas, and stopped showing up to school.

“The other thing we are trying to be transparent with, is being able to get caught up on Canvas. This trend started when we had virtual and hybrid students, but now we have seen that some students have begun to take advantage of that system,” Wiseman said. “It’s actually a trend that people have seen all over the country of students just not coming to school because they could just get caught up online. So now we want to make sure that students are aware that if they miss more than 10% of the school year, we reserve the right to move around your course placements, or whatever we need to do to ensure you are actually supported at the school.”

Senior Jahnavi Avula said she thinks the school should allow for more leeway.

“I think that the premise of the policy is good, as obviously it is important for students to come to school. But I think it definitely doesn’t account for extenuating circumstances like being sick where you might not have a doctor’s note to get an excused absence. For example, at the beginning of the year I was sick with a fever so I missed a day of school, but I didn’t need to go to the doctor for that. In situations like that the new policy negatively affects students,” she said.

Junior Tashvi Pydimarry said the new policies will cause her more difficulty. 

“I actually am an actor, so I miss school occasionally for filming and theater work I have to do,” she said. “Obviously I get the absences excused, but since there are new restrictions about being caught up on Canvas, it makes things harder. I think there has to be another way to encourage students to come to school than to jeopardize students who may have special circumstances in which they need to be caught up on Canvas.” 

Wiseman said that along with more consequences, there are new incentives being made as well. 

“We are very excited to present the new incentives for this year, because I do think that students should be rewarded for coming to school because it is a lot of work,” she said. “So we just had our first attendance lunch last week where people who had perfect attendance were drawn at random. They get to have two slices of pizza, soda and more at lunch and can go back and eat with their friends. At the end of the quarter we are going to be giving out some airpods and parking passes for students with perfect attendance as well. We just want to make sure people are appreciated for coming to school as well, because we know that it can be a lot of hard work.”