Skip classes in Minnetonka and you'll have mom, dad on your case

There's no such thing as a Ferris Bueller day off anymore in Minnetonka. Skip school and you'll face the consequences.

While most high schools penalize unexcused absences with lower grades, Minnetonka High School has found a more effective method of dealing with its truants: Calling their parents right away to discuss any unexcused absence, and calling the students themselves to task during the next day's classes -- questioning their whereabouts and requiring them to serve detention.

After looking at five years of attendance and grading data, the district abandoned a policy that lowered students' grades for missing class without a valid excuse. It found that using grades as a deterrent was ineffective.

Since adopting its new policy, Minnetonka has seen unexcused absences drop 55 percent. And while unexcused absences made up nearly 10 percent of all absences during 2006-07, that figure was down to 2.4 percent last school year.

Minnetonka High Assistant Principal Jeff Erickson said the district decided "the grade should reflect what a student knows and can do," and that attendance should be dealt with another way.

"Our goal isn't to kick them out of class -- it's to hold them accountable. And if they're not in class, we know why."

Greater accountability

The new attendance policy, adopted for the 2007-08 school year, was opposed by some parents. "They thought if we took away that grade as the whip, we'd see anarchy," Erickson said.

But after attendance rates dramatically improved during the first year of the new policy, the school was lauded locally and nationally.

Douglas Reeves, founder of the Leadership and Learning Center, a Colorado-based organization that works with schools to improve student achievement and educational equity, took particular interest.

In his May 2008 Educational Leadership article, "Leading to Change/Improving Student Attendance," Reeves praised Minnetonka administrators for bucking the national trend of lowering grades to deal with attendance issues.

"The fundamental issue, as Minnetonka found out, is not going easy on these kids, but rather having the right consequences," Reeves said.

Minnetonka's attendance policy gets to the heart of why a student misses class. Even first-time offenders face consequences. Hall monitors are knocking at classroom doors looking for answers from students who missed class the previous day. And parents are notified within hours of a roll call that shows their child has been absent.

A student with an unexcused absence also must serve detention before or after school. And if a student accumulates four unexcused absences in one class during a semester, the student loses all credit for that class and must take it again -- though he or she does not get a failing grade.

Students take the new consequences more seriously than they did when attendance affected their grades, administrators say. In the words of one student cited by Reeves, "Last year, I could skip and nobody cared. This year, if I skip once I'm taken to the woodshed."

Behavior improves

This year, the file cabinets in the behavior room at Minnetonka High School aren't as full as they once were. The school saw a 42 percent decrease in disciplinary cases for the 2007-08 school year and a 36 percent decrease in overall suspensions. School-skipping violations are also down for every grade.

Before the attendance policy was changed, Minnetonka High Senior Sheila Eastman said there were a lot of perpetual skippers.

"The [new] attendance policy makes it harder for kids to be absent," she said. "There's almost a kind of peer pressure, because everyone wonders where you are when you're not in your math class. You stick out like a sore thumb."

The Hennepin County Attorney's Office, which handles student truancies, hopes more schools take a similar intervention approach to attendance.

Research shows that one of the most important factors for success is getting a firm handle on attendance issues quickly and at the school level, said Deputy County Attorney Pat Diamond.

Diamond said consequences are often too far removed from the behavior to make an impact -- like a lower class grade that doesn't come until weeks later when a report card arrives at home.

"Anyone who's a parent to a teenager understands that immediate accountability is better than waiting a month and then trying to hold a teenager accountable," Diamond said.

Other metro area schools employ a range of attendance policies. Edina High School, for instance, also uses multiple intervention checkpoints, but on the fourth unexcused absence, a student is dropped from a class, given an "F" in the course and placed in a study hall.

The district is currently examining options for those students to recover credit through an online program. Wayzata and Delano school districts also reduce grades for excessive absences.

Bloomington, Richfield and Hopkins school districts use an intervention approach rather than a punitive approach to attendance as well, but again, not with the comprehensive rapid response system Minnetonka uses.

Aimée Blanchette • 612-673-1715