With distance learning underway Highland Principal Chris Trostad and High School Principal Eric Bubna discussed how attendance is being tracked for the Crookston School District. Tracking attendance is a required component of the order to provide distance learning, and Trostad said Highland is doing that through daily interaction with the students. “Yeah, there is an attendance requirement by the governor with distance learning that we have to take attendance every day,” said Trostad. “How we do that, a lot of that is daily interactions with kids. So, as long as kids are online, submitting their work, they would be considered to be present at school. It is very important that daily interaction takes place by email, phone call, through one of the apps like Seesaw, Google Classroom. As long as those kids are interacting, they are going to be considered to be present at school.”
Trostad said that if students are sick and unable to partake in online learning for the day, parents should still call the school, so the student can be marked sick. “If a student is sick, we’d ask a parent to call the school,” said Trostad. “We’d mark them sick, and then the teacher would know that they aren’t going to be available that day for online learning. We want to be as understanding as possible, but on the other hand, the governor has assigned us the task of distance learning and monitoring attendance. The teachers are expected to have daily interactions with the students, so parents and students are expected to see that those daily interactions are happening too. If there is anything we can do to help, let us know, communicate with us. But those daily interactions need to take place every day. If they’re not, then students are considered to be absent that day, and we need to report that. We want to work with parents as best as possible.”
Crookston High School is using two strategies to track attendance. One is an advisory class that will be used for official attendance, and the second is teacher meetings to monitor the academic progress of students. “That’s something we’re figuring out as we go,” said Bubna. “Right now, all the kids have what we’re calling an advisory call or counseling class if you will. Mrs. (Leah) Zimmerman is running that along with Mr. (Matt) Torgerson. Attendance is going to based on three check-in questions a week – one for Monday, Tuesday, one for Wednesday/Thursday, and one for Friday through Sunday. That’s kind of what we’re basing our attendance on as far as what goes in Skyward as attendance. We’ll also have an attendance meeting once a week with teachers to see who isn’t logging in. I guess that’s more of an academic progress question than an attendance. The short answer right now is we’re basing attendance on them logging into that advisory class and answering those questions.”
Bubna said he hopes the weekly academic progress meetings with teachers will help them track engagement, attendance, and check to make sure students have the devices and support they need for distance learning. “We’re trying to figure out what we’re going to do when they log into that advisory class and answer that question so that in Skyward, they are marked present, but they are doing nothing academically,” said Bubna. “We have that problem when we’re here physically at school too. We have a small number of students that show up every day, but they put their heads down and don’t do much. So, we are having weekly meetings with the teachers. Mr. Torgerson is facilitating grades seven to nine, I’m facilitating grades 10-12 with the teachers from those grades and seeing what kids are checking in, but they are maybe not getting their work done. Let’s call home, make sure they have a device, see what kind of supports they need. We have our first set of meetings tomorrow, and I’m hoping we have a pretty clear picture as to what our academic progress is looking like, what our engagement rate is like, and that attendance piece too.”
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