Weast cancels LC

Superintendent Jerry Weast eliminated the Loss of Credit (LC) policy after receiving recommendations from the Loss of Credit Project Team, an MCPS work group that researched the policy for eighteen months. According to Suzanne Maxey, head of the team, Weast also implemented the work group's proposed policies designed to reduce absences and truancy.

According to principal Darryl Williams the current policy states that a student can lose credit for a class if they have five unexcused absences or fifteen tardy arrivals during a semester. Instead of being punitive, the new attendance policies focus on the positive aspects of attendance, Williams said. "The new policy is trying to find the root causes and what can be done to fix those issues," he said.

The Blair Instructional Leadership Team will work over the summer to implement the new plans said Williams. As opposed to an academic penalty, students with unexcused absences will now receive a disciplinary penalty such as detention or a parental conference. The new policy also allows teachers to deny a student the opportunity to make up an assignment they missed due to an illegal absence. Finally, schools are to create an attendance committee that will closely track attendance, monitor truant students and hold interventions with students who have absence issues.

According to Maxey, one of the major issues with the LC policy is that it unfairly targets minority groups including Latinos, blacks, freshmen, special education students, ESOL students and students with free and reduced lunch. These groups receive four times more LCs as opposed to white and Asian students even though they have the same absences, Maxey said. According to Maxey, the team believes this discrepancy arises because white parents are more likely to write passes for their children to resolve attendance issues. "What you end up doing is grading kids based on whether their parents are writing notes for them or not," she said.

The team also concluded that some teachers implemented the LC inconsistently and improperly. According to Maxey, the teacher is the one who ultimately decides whether a student would lose credit for a class. In one school, the team observed, one teacher had filled out 65 percent of all LC forms. In this case, not all students were treated equally, Maxey said. "[Students] can have radically different grades depending on the teacher," she said.

In a May 11 memorandum to the Board of Education, Weast cited that the LC policy contradicted the Grading and Reporting policy, which stated that grades should accurately reflect a student's academic achievement. "The central tenets of grading and reporting," the memorandum stated, "are inherently incompatible with the current practice of denying students credit based on attendance."

There has been concern that the elimination of the LC policy will lead to lower attendance rates, Williams said. According to social studies teacher Anne Manuel, the idea of giving disciplinary punishments is a good idea in theory but could backfire in practice. "It's really going to be difficult because I'm afraid it'll be misinterpreted by kids who don't think they have to come to class." she said. But according to Maxey, there are many who believe that LC policy is an unfair punishment. If a student loses credit for a course they have little incentive for coming back to class because they will not receive credit, Maxey argued. Under the new policy a teacher does not have to give an absent student the opportunity to make up work making the punishment fairer and allowing students to fix their grade by working harder, Maxey said. "The punishment should be appropriate to the offense," she said.

The elimination of the LC policy and the implementation of new policies will shift the work of managing attendance from teachers to administrators, Williams said. Teachers no longer have to go through the LC process, which requires them to track a student's attendance, send out warning letters, issue an LC and sometimes go through a student appeal process, he said. Instead, the administration has to create a system to track attendance, give penalties and help each individual student who has attendance issues.