News
School Board to vote on attendance policy at July 6 meeting
The Seattle School Board at its July 6 meeting is scheduled to vote on several proposed changes to procedures that govern attendance and truancy in Seattle Public Schools. We are providing a summary of these updates and clarifications here, and we encourage families and community member to submit comments to the school board via email at schoolboard@seattleschools.org or to provide public testimony during the July 6 meeting.
Here are the proposed changes:
- Change the wording so that "educational trips" are excused absences but "short family trips" (vacations) are not excused. This change is being proposed because many schools already include bans on family vacations in their student handbooks, and elementary school administrators in particular are concerned that elementary students are missing critical academic instruction.
- Add "religious holidays" as excused absences. This adds to the already established procedure of excusing absences for religious events.
- Add new sections to Section V of the attendance procedure regarding tardies and excessive excused absences.
- Tardies: A tardy is defined as arriving late to school or to any class during the school day. Tardies may be excused or unexcused according to school rules/policies and District definitions for excused and unexcused absences. Secondary students who miss 10 or more minutes of instructional time in a class may be marked as absent. Elementary students who miss 15 or more minutes of core instructional time for 10 or more days in a school year will be subject to interventions for these tardies and may be subject to a truancy petition.
- Excessive excused absences: Students who exceed 20 excused absences in a school year will be subject to interventions for these absences and may be subject to a truancy petition since excessive excused absences can have a serious adverse effect on students' academic progress.
- Remove the cross reference in the procedure to a truancy manual, since a paper copy of a truancy manual is no longer used. Instead the reference is the truancy websites, one for the public and one for SPS employees, that provide the same information that used to be included in a truancy manual and are updated regularly.
You can see the complete document of proposed attendance and truancy procedure changes here.
If you have questions about these changes, please email Ruth McFadden at rmcfadden@seattleschools.org.