Imagine this: you work your tail off the last couple of weeks in the semester in order to get your grades looking good again. You go to teachers for help and make up work at lunch every day for the last three weeks of the semester and manage, most importantly, to take that D you  had in geometry to a B. You finish the semester feeling good and head into summer with a spring in your step.

However, when report cards come in the mail, you notice that all that work you put in went for naught as you see a dreaded E3 on your report card for that geometry class due to lack of attendance. That’s right, this means that you not only have to make up that semester of geometry, but when you come back to school you will still be listed in the same grade you were last year.

This is totally unfair.

High school is supposed to prepare you for college, right? That’s what I thought until I was told that an E3, which causes you to lose credit for a class in high school, will not  cause you to lose credit for a course in college.  The only way you can lose credit for a course in college is by actually failing it, meaning that you receive an E on the content in a class. This is failing a class, not failing attendance.

The truth is, if you manage to pass a class, your attendance should not matter.

According to the MCPS Student Attendance regulation policy, “Students with three unlawful absences in a class will be warned of the possibility of failure.” The policy continues, “If a student continues to be further unlawfully absent, the student will be considered to be in danger of receiving a failing grade in that course.”MCPS is not the only district with such a strict attendance policy. At Belmont High School in Belmont, Massachusetts, their attendance policy is similar. Belmont public school policy states that “six undocumented excused and/or unexcused absences in a single quarter of a year-long course will receive an N for a grade…The comment of ‘Failure due to attendance’ will be noted on the student’s report card.”

At Hart High School In Santa Clarita CA, their policy states,

Students who have excessive absences jeopardize their academic success and progress towards graduation. In order to help students develop good attendance habits, the Hart High Attendance Policy limits students to 15 absences a semester. The absences can be comprised of excused absences, unexcused absences, or truancy.

Attendance notifications will be made as follows: At 5 absences a letter will be sent home, at 10 absences a letter will be sent home as well as a staff contacting the student’s parent, and at 13 a student study team meeting will be held and a contract will be signed.

From all the sites I’ve visited that detail school district policies, none of them actually seems to explain or answer why attendance is, essentially, as important as proficiency.  All these websites tell you is why the schools are concerned about student’s absences, which is understandable. Students’ absences affect their learning and education. The more days students miss, the less knowledge they are gaining which usually results in their grade falling significantly. Therefore, for those who are absent a lot and fail a course because they never really mastered the content, night school  is very useful for them to gain that knowledge and give them an opportunity to get a better grade and earn credit.  

However, this need to show mastery of the course content was  not the case for me. Last year, I was assigned an E3 grade for my Geometry class due to excessive absences (which were, in my defense, mostly tardies that added up to absences). My lateness and absences did not exactly faze me. Even though I did fall short and slacked a bit, I was still able to push myself to succeed. In fact, I thought that I had worked hard enough at the end of the semester to improve my grade and earn my credit. Which I seem to have been wrong.

There are students who don’t just sit around and watch themselves fail; they  actually work hard to change that, and I was one of them  I admit, I was late far too often and that was difficult, but  my tardiness did not stop me from earning the grade I actually planned to get.

All of this makes me wonder why such a policy is truly necessary. To see that a student put in all this effort to be better, but in the end have to learn that it wasn’t good enough is disheartening. If a student is able to earn or maintain a C or higher in a class, the amount of times they are late or absent should not determine their final grade, and whether or not they pass or fail the course.