September is National Attendance Awareness Month and for one school in Jefferson, they have made tremendous progress in just one year.

Greene County Elementary Principal Audrey Hinote says they reduced their chronic absenteeism rate by 54 percent last school year. She tells Raccoon Valley Radio the definition of being “chronically absent” is a student missing 17 days, or ten percent, of a school year. Hinote says they dropped from 29 percent of chronically absent kids to 13 percent in the first year that she became the elementary principal. 

Hinote explains the main focus the building leadership team had to improve overall student attendance was increasing awareness to families, students, and staff aware of their goal to reduce chronic absenteeism by 50 percent.

“The very first thing we did was we communicated our goals to our families last year in October. We sent reports home about our academic achievement and with the report we included a letter just letting families know that this was a goal that we had. And then as the year progressed we reported to our families and our staff how we were doing with relation to our goal.” 

Fourth grader Luke Larson describes why he feels it’s important to come to school.

“It’s important to come to school to learn and play with friends, go out to recess. I love math, reading, all sorts of that stuff. If we didn’t have school then we wouldn’t learn anything and we wouldn’t get smart.”  

Hinote stresses the need for students to be at school when they can in order to increase their academic learning. She adds that the elementary school has a goal for this school year to further reduce their chronic absenteeism rate to five percent or less of students missing school.