School attendance a hot topic

Lafourche Parish students could see a reduction in the number of absent days allowed following a revision to state Department of Education attendance policy.

Lafourche Parish schools spokesman Floyd Benoit said that the revised attendance policy will be reviewed by board members at the school board meeting tonight at 7 p.m.

Toward the end of the 2007-08 school year, the Board of Education for Secondary and Elementary schools handed down the state’s revised attendance policy requiring elementary and junior high students to attend school a minimum of 160 days out of the year to receive full credit in all their courses.

Block scheduling makes the high school student requirements a little different. High schoolers are required to attend school 81 days per session for full-credit courses and 40 days for half-credit courses.

However, Lafourche Parish is not the first school system to tackle the attendance policy in the Tri-parish area. The St. Mary Parish School Board adopted its revisions on June 12.

Both school boards began revising their attendance policy in May with the help of the Baton Rouge-based educational consulting firm, Forethought Consulting.

The firm was hired by the Department of Education to help school districts conform to state education policies.

“The consulting firm uses the state policy to revise district policies as needed,” said Dr. Donald Aguillard, St. Mary’s superintendent of schools.

“Districts can only use contact days, which is 177 student instructional days, in the school year,” he explained. “Not the 182 that is on the calendar. So when you back off of that the number of days, St. Mary Parish had to change it policies from allowing 20 absences per year to 14.”

Neither Lafourche nor St. Mary school district believes that enforcing the new mandate will be a problem.