BY ANNA BOWLING

With the turn of the new year, students can expect a new policy on how their hours of absence are determined. Instead of working with half days and full days, there is now more leniency with how they miss school.

The former attendance policy only allowed for ten days of school to be missed by a student. This could be used by doctors appointments, illness, and field trips.

This policy has recently changed and students will soon be able to miss sixty-five hours of instructional time based on different statistics.

Instead of being marked absent for a half or full day, kids will now be marked with missed instructional time by period.

The biggest changes that kids and their parents will see with the attendance in progress book is the definitions of absences. The five descriptions that could be seen would be excused absence, unexcused absence, non-absence, excused truancy and unexcused truancy.

These changes have not been put into effect yet, but the school system hopes to have the plans implemented by the days following Christmas Break.
While administration hopes to have a seamless transition, there are some kinks that still need to be worked out.

The attendance and main offices have left some aspects out of the conversation.
“The school sees this as an intervention plan to see kids in schools, and keep seeing these kids in school,” says Mr. Kresowaty, the attendance officer of the school.

School officials will have to submit a monthly report that includes truancies, absences, suspensions and field trips. These reports will be submitted for Wadsworth through Mr. Kresowaty. He has to calculate all the periods into hours, and the system has not yet been finalized by the code writers at the state of Ohio.

With the system being implemented around Christmas, kids still have time to learn how this is going to affect them, and if it will, how to make the job of the attendance office a little easier.