Rising eight graders at Woodington Middle School sharpened their data-crunching and communications skills this summer by investigating student attendance trends and developing recommendations for reducing absenteeism.
The students, whose two-week summer session focused on Math I and English Language Arts, presented their findings to parents and educators on July 23, when Woodington hosted a showcase for some 50 students involved in summer learning at the school.
“This was a culmination of two weeks of summer enrichment,” Kristin Davenport, the school’s assistant principal and leader of the summer program, said as the event wrapped up. “We’ve had a Math I group that did some English I as well, we’ve had a seventh and eighth grade STEM group and a sixth-grade bridge camp,” a session to acquaint last school year’s fifth graders with middle school. The school also hosted LCPS’s Camp Excel for students in its migrant program.
“The eighth graders focused on attendance,” Davenport explained. ‘They took our attendance numbers from last year and created a project on how to get attendance to increase at Woodington.”
Attendance had been a long-running topic for students and staff, Davenport told the parents. “Attendance counts,” she said. “One of our main initiatives in Lenoir County Public Schools is attendance. We talk to the student about just how quickly things can add up. Missing 10 percent of school is two days a month. In a 10-month school year, that’s 20 days.”
The students’ research showed that, for the year, attendance ranged from 81 to 88 percent, depending on the grade level. Half of students were late getting to school sometime during the year and 27 percent left early.
Armed with posters and graphics illustrating their findings, the students offered four ideas for increasing their schoolmate’s connection with Woodington and boosting attendance figures. They were:
An incentive system to reward students with exception attendance, as well as good grades and good behavior, using Raider Bucs, the school script exchanged for prizes.
More clubs, designed to appeal to a range of students’ interests and provide a point of attraction beyond academics.
More hands-on assignments from teachers, a way to make school more “fun.”
Tweaking the school day schedule to make the AIM period – the time for tutoring and enrichment activities – the first of the day and begin core instruction periods an hour later, at 8:50 a.m.
Davenport said the Raider Bucs idea, voted the favorite by parents at the showcase, would be considered by Woodington’s administration. First, the students would need to fill in the details. “For them to be able to develop the program instead of us developing the program schoolwide changes the way their perspective on all that goes into it.”
A message of the school’s campaign to boost attendance – missed school time means missed opportunities – has been adopted by students confronting the challenge this summer, according to Davenport. “Talking with them and listening to them, we saw that they were having the same conversations that we were having ad adults. That was very powerful,” she said.