POLICY WON'T STOP SKIPPING METRO Edition

At six of the 13 Orange County high schools, at least 20 percent of the student population missed 21 or more days of school last year. Altogether, almost 6,100 Orange County high school students missed at least a month of their nine-month school year, according to an Aug. 30 Sentinel article. Last y...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inThe Orlando sentinel
Main Author D.J. Swanson, Winter Park High
Format Newspaper Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Orlando, Fla Tribune Publishing Company, LLC 06.11.1998
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Summary:At six of the 13 Orange County high schools, at least 20 percent of the student population missed 21 or more days of school last year. Altogether, almost 6,100 Orange County high school students missed at least a month of their nine-month school year, according to an Aug. 30 Sentinel article. Last year, absences were not classified as excused or unexcused. If you missed 10 days of class in any subject, you simply had to pass your semester exam to be given credit for that semester. Ironically, even if you had perfect attendance and failed your semester exam, you usually wound up failing the class anyway. Because absences didn't need to be cleared through the attendance office, students didn't have to notify their parents of missed school and could simply come and go as they pleased. Each school was responsible for keeping parents notified of their child's attendance. Winter Park High used an automated phone message for this purpose. Unfortunately, this phone call was usually answered by the student, who would quickly hang up and pretend like nothing had happened. A few innovative students even used call-blocking to keep the machine from getting through again.