The Price of Hooky

Nearly a decade ago, Granada Hills High School imposed a strict rule on attendance: Skip classes too often without a valid excuse and you flunk. Attendance went up, and so did grades -- until the Los Angeles Unified School District told the school to stop, saying that only the district could formulate attendance policies.

It took all these years and an ugly budget crunch for the L.A. school board to start doing so. The district will offer extra campus money and field trips as rewards for improved attendance. There’s even familiar talk of tying attendance to grades.

In the last year, school districts have gotten serious about cracking down on unexcused absences. The Los Alamitos schools asked parents a year ago to donate $40 for each day their child missed. About $5,000 rolled in, but better yet, attendance rates improved.

The Capistrano schools in south Orange County changed the calendar for the coming school year. Everyone gets the week off during Thanksgiving because absenteeism doubles then -- and also rises sharply among teachers, costing the district money for substitutes. To make up the days, the school year starts earlier.

Clever ideas, all. But why did it take so long to get here? Attendance is the most basic part of schooling. Missing class means falling behind, sometimes woefully so, as well as extra work for teachers who must offer catch-up sessions and make-up tests.

The current attendance craze springs from a quirk in school funding. The state pays school districts a certain amount per student -- about $40 -- but that’s based on the number who show up each day on average, not on the number of students enrolled. The system is hard on schools because they still have to pay teachers and utility bills during a flu epidemic. Yet this didn’t make a big difference until schools were in a financial bind. Now they’re paying a lot more attention.

The formula also puts urban and poor districts at a real disadvantage. For various reasons, their attendance rates are lower. The 6.5% absentee rate for Los Angeles Unified is twice that of the Capistrano Unified School District. Yet crowded schools with multitrack schedules, common in L.A., cannot give everyone Thanksgiving week off.

Schools must be able to count on a guaranteed sum based on enrollment, which determines their expenses for the year. Beyond that base, the state should offer clear financial incentives to schools that boost attendance.

The state also should use a powerful carrot and stick already in its hands. Attendance rates are supposed to count in a school’s annual Academic Performance Index score, along with test results and other factors. But the state hasn’t even started trying to come up with a way to figure in absenteeism and has no plans to do so within the next three years. That’s too long to wait. Schools are more likely to act if low attendance means a poor grade -- and so are students.