Sisters schools have strong attendance record

Oregon schools have a big problem with too many absentees, according to a recent report of the Chalkboard Project, based in Portland (see story page 35).

The project's recent report on absenteeism was featured in an Associated Press story distributed across the state last month. The story said: "Average daily attendance in Oregon public schools was 88 percent of total fall enrollment in the 200-01 school year, the Chalkboard Project reported. Only Kentucky reported a lower number."

If that is true across the state, it would not appear to be true in Sisters. When asked whether the local schools have an attendance problem, Middle School Principal Lora Nordquist said flatly, "No, they don't at all."

She acknowledged that all three schools in the Sisters district have "a very few students with significant attendance issues. And I know that at all three schools we try to deal with that on an individual basis to try to find out what's going on: Why is this student not coming to school? Is there a legitimate health issue that needs to be addressed?... Lots of times it's something interpersonally that's causing a student not to come to school, and you try to help with that... But I would not in any sense of the word say that we have an attendance problem."

The numbers support her conclusion. According to the Oregon Department of Education (ODE), the attendance rate at Sisters Elementary School last year (2003-04) was 94.4 percent, up from 93.9 percent the year before. The middle school rate last year was 96.2 percent, up from 95.7 percent the year before.

Statistics for the high school for 2003-2004 won't be available until November. But the state office says the high school's attendance rate was 94.2 percent in 2002-03 and 93.5 percent in 2001-02.

For purposes of comparison, the 2002-03 statewide average attendance rate for high schools was 91.8 percent and for elementary and middle schools combined, 93.9 percent.

Those numbers are clearly higher than the 88 percent reported by the Chalkboard Project. Why the difference?

Brian Reeder, director of the ODE Office of Policy Research and Analysis, told The Nugget that the report's numbers "are not true attendance rates." The reason is that consistent data for all states do not exist. So the organization "has developed this proxy, which is the total number of kids attending in the numerator and in the denominator they have the number of kids at the beginning of the year.

"But kids come and go during the year... For example, if you have 100 kids at the beginning of the year but then some leave, the ones that left have no possibility of attending... so you've biased your attendance rate downwards."

Reeder was careful to acknowledge that the flaw in the Chalkboard measuring system affects the numbers from all states, not just Oregon.

"We're not saying that their conclusion is wrong. It may be quite accurate. But we don't truly know that because their measure is not quite what you'd like it to be," Reeder said.

The state's own data on attendance are based on daily records of the number of students enrolled vs. the number absent.

"If you take a true attendance rate calculation, most of our districts are up in the 93, 94, 95 percent range, which is higher than the 88 percent they (Chalkboard) reported," Reeder said. "But if you calculated a true attendance rate for other states they may be higher, too. So Oregon may still be one of the lowest. We don't really know."