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New Initiative Aims To Improve Attendance At Wichita Schools

When kids miss a lot of school days, it can affect their academic performance, and they can easily fall behind in learning.

Chronic absenteeism is defined as missing 10 percent or more days of school, or roughly 18 days a year.

Educators say students who fail to show up for school in those early years--kindergarten through third grade-- also face an increased risk of dropping out of high school. This fall, the United Way of the Plains launched a new initiative called “Be There” to help solve some of the issues that contribute to absenteeism.

KMUW’s Deborah Shaar talked with Pat Hanrahan, the president and CEO of the United Way of the Plains, to find out more.

The United Way’s “Be There” initiative is underway at seven elementary schools that feed into West High School. According to Hanrahan, about 25 percent of students at those schools are chronically absent.

The United Way partnered with Communities in Schools of Wichita/Sedgwick County to run the intervention program at the schools.

Full-time and part-time coordinators are at the schools to work with the teachers and principal. Hanrahan says the coordinators also make contact with parents and offer solutions to barriers that might be preventing them from getting their kids to school.

“The teachers are very thrilled to have that extra help. We have a lot of good teachers in USD 259, but they cannot teach an empty chair,” Hanrahan says. “From what we know of this program in other communities, we think it’s going to be very successful. All the experts say if you cannot read at the third-grade level in third grade, you have about a 1 in 4 chance of graduating from high school. It’s that important."

The “Be There” initiative includes:

  • A public awareness campaign.
  • Offering information to parents about practical ways to improve the attendance of their elementary or middle/high school students.
  • An education summit, which was held on Sept. 23.
  • The intervention program at the seven elementary schools that feed into West High School.

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Follow Deborah Shaar on Twitter @deborahshaar.

To contact KMUW News or to send in a news tip, reach us at news@kmuw.org.

Deborah joined the news team at KMUW in September 2014 as a news reporter. She spent more than a dozen years working in news at both public and commercial radio and television stations in Ohio, West Virginia and Detroit, Michigan. Before relocating to Wichita in 2013, Deborah taught news and broadcasting classes at Tarrant County College in the Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas area.