Learning Starts with Showing Up

Learning starts with showing up.

That is until you understand how completely disheartening and wrong it is as a teacher and/or school admin to notify parents that their child has been away from school for ‘x’ number of days… and ask them if there’s anything you can do to support them back into the classroom, even though you are fully aware that the child is away from school because they are sick, or are bereaving the loss of a loved one in another part of the country.

The current policy requires schools to notify parents at certain points of non-attendance. If the student has been away for 5 days of the term, they get their first notification from the teacher to inform them that they will no longer meet the 90% attendance rate.

And why is notification such a big issue? It’s not.
But it’s how it looks. It’s how it feels. And it’s also what it leads to.
Because how it looks when a teacher emails a notification to a family while they are up north at tangi saying their child has now been away from school for 5 or more days is heartless. And what it leads to, eventually with enough days off, is prosecution.

The issue is that this notification happens regardless of why that student might be away, and whether that reason is justified or not. The policy simply looks at one metric – are they at school or not?

A child who is sick? Away from school. Counts towards notification
A family away for bereavement in the family? Away from school. Counts towards notification.
A child wags school? Away from school. Counts towards notification.

Now don’t get me wrong. One of these situations absolutely needs to be addressed, followed up on, and should lead to prosecution if it is chronic. I don’t think you’ll find a single teacher who would argue against that. The others should absolutely not be put in that same category.