Perspective is one of the most valuable skills people can learn. Perspective can help somebody understand how the human mind operates and why other people act or feel in a different manner compared to themselves. Perspective can help somebody grow empathy for other people’s situations. Perspective can even help somebody grow as a person by understanding the consequences of their own actions.
One relevant topic that requires the use of perspective is school attendance and the lack of attendance in some students.
“Every kid is different, nobody knows their story or outside life but them,” Assistant Principal Dr. Rom Crespo said.
Many people wonder, “Why do some students have terrible attendance?” It is important to break the answer down into two categories: missing school entirely and missing certain classes.
Missing school will cause students to miss tests, quizzes, and new topics, which will lead to them to fall behind on multiple classes in not only one class, but potentially all of their classes. Students can miss school for many reasons such as lack of transportation or illness. However, one of the main reasons students miss school is a matter of their priorities. Some students have family matters that they see as more important than school and have to miss school to handle their matters.
“Their family issues may deter them from coming to school or they may have their own adult responsibilities that they need to handle,” Crespo said.
Other students see school as a nuisance and have no interest in showing up.
“I have missed a combined 45 school hours from my absences,” Senior Luke Mckinney said. “When I didn’t feel like going to school, I simply didn’t go.”
Sometimes students will also skip a class because they want to go hang out in another classroom with their friends. Or, the student will repeatedly miss a class because they don’t like the teacher or subject.
“If the student finds this subject boring and doesn’t find the learning interesting, the student will repeatedly skip that class,” Crespo said.
School isn’t viewed the same for all students and thus each student’s effort in their attendance is different as well. Students that view school as a place of learning and education that prepares them for the future tend to show much care towards their attendance than students that view school as more of a nuisance, who tend to show little care about their attendance.
With all these different perspectives about school, a common assumption about chronically absent students is that they are bad people, which isn’t always true. Chronically absent students could be having outside of school matters, preventing them from attending school consistently. Them being chronically absent doesn’t automatically make them bad people, but rather it could show how many issues they have outside of school.
