A wintry mixed message

One report, at a recent Board of Education meeting, showed overall SJSD attendance of 77.3% in December, up from 72.4% the same month in 2021. But that still averages to roughly one missed day a week.

To be clear, the attendance problem can’t be blamed on one single factor. There’s the hangover from COVID-19. There’s the tendency of an immigrant population to move around. COVID may have disrupted adult work schedules just as much as the school schedules of children.

The fix should begin with parents, especially those with young children. More than anyone else, they need to make sure attendance is a priority. The Buchanan County Prosecutor’s Office can make a difference in enforcing a more assertive policy on compulsory attendance laws. For some but not all parents, a knock on the door from a police officer or someone from the prosecutor’s office will change behaviors.

But make no mistake, the school system has a role to play as well, and not just in promoting the issue. Actions count as much as words.

Last week, the SJSD took three snow days: one for the Kansas City Chiefs Super Bowl Parade and two because of inclement weather.

Please don’t take this as a “back-in-my-day” rant. Each particular cancellation had some merit, either because of road conditions or the trouble with getting substitute teachers on the day of the parade. School officials have a difficult decision to make in real time.

But kids are smart. They’re especially adept in mining adults for mixed messages and inconsistencies that justify what they want to do. In this case, they didn’t want to go to school in the doldrums of February.

What they may have learned is that school is important, but perhaps a little less important when conditions are less than ideal. But that’s not how it’s going to be in the real world when these children become adults and their future bosses demand that they show up regardless of the weather or whether they are “feeling it” on Monday morning when the alarm goes off.

No one is asking anyone to go uphill in the snow both ways. But school officials would be doing a service to these students if it demonstrated that, at least on occasion, you might have to show up even when the weather doesn’t cooperate.