School attendance has seen a severe decrease over the past years within LAUSD. The rate of California students who missed at least 10% of school days tripled during the 2021-22 school year, and attendance has never fully rebounded to pre-pandemic levels, according to LAUSD’s attendance tracker. Attendance impacts all schools differently, but LACES employees have observed a decrease in attendance within the past few years.
“We have had an increase of students being absent,” stated Principal Ms. Kimberly Lesure.
For LACES, excellent attendance (meaning the rate of students who have 7 or less absences throughout the school year) is at 57%, andchronic absence (meaning the rate of students who have more than 15 absences throughout the school year) is at 17%. For context, one area school has a chronic absence rate of around 30% and an excellent attendance rate of 45%. LAUSD overall has had an excellent attendance rate of 55.06% and a chronic absence rate of 26.67% in the 2023-24 school year. Although LACES has had an overall higher attendance rate than other LAUSD schools, some administrators believe that it should still be higher due to the academic rigor of LACES.
“If it’s for an appropriate reason, or they’re sick, then it is the right idea to not come to school,” said assistant principal Mr. Oliver Rivas. “However, school is important, and I feel students have to be here
every day.”
The attendance policy for LAUSD is that students shouldn’t miss more than seven days throughout the entire year. The attendance office has a process to make sure they are contacting parents so they know of any absences.
“So our attendance office will call home, [Assistant Principal] Mr. [Brandy] Alexander and the counselors do home visits if we have not heard from students in several days and we can’t reach them by phone,” said Lesure.
The LACES administration is trying to decrease chronic absence and increase basic attendance by more than just phone calls. If students at LACES have better attendance from here until the end of the year, chronic absence will decrease and proficient attendance will increase. They are in the process of coming up with incentives and prizes to encourage students to attend school.
“To encourage students to be here every day, we are going to be starting some incentives, we are trying to decide on what that might be and what the incentives might look like, getting students’ feedback will be good, or doing an assembly to talk about it,” said Lesure.
The incentives will be taking place around the 15-week marking period, according to administrators.λ
