Missing Children

The last few years my work as a school teacher has involved teaching in Title I (high poverty, low academic performance) schools with large minority populations. Previous to my current assignment I was working at a school that was 90%+ black and hispanic. In a high school with an alleged enrollment of nearly 700 students, we had a daily absentee rate of 50%. Hard as it is to believe, our 700 on paper was 350 in classrooms.

I learned a few things here. First, once a child was “on the books” (enrolled in the school) it was virtually impossible to remove him, even if you never once saw his face. District policy required that for a child to be removed, he must be marked absent 10 days in a row in every class. Inevitably some teacher or the other would simply neglect to take roll in one class, one day, and the countdown would begin anew. So even though this kid never showed up, he was still “enrolled.”

This allowed the school to still collect the funds allocated by federal, state and local money for students. Disenrolling a student would have cost the school north of $10,000, so if the district had honestly reported true numbers the finances would have collapsed.

That being said, I came to suspect that some teachers were intentionally failing to take roll with administrative approval, or perhaps even administrative rewards. Our principal would publicly bemoan the lack of proper bookkeeping and threaten consequences, but nothing ever happened, and I sincerely doubt he wanted anything to happen.

Besides the financial irregularities involved, this also led to hijinks in grading. All the teachers at the school were given a certain percentage of students you were allowed to assign a failing grade in your class, and past that number everyone would receive a passing grade. I found that once I assigned “F” grades to all the students who never showed up I had used up my full allotment of failing grades; hence in order to pass the class all you had to do was show up occasionally.

Following covid, when schools re-opened, hundreds, if not thousands of children were missing from district enrollment. I don’t know if all of these kids were ever really there at all, but I’m sure some of them must have been, and now they have just “disappeared.” This is not just at the high school level, it’s the entire K-12 system in a district with over 20,000 students. Nobody knows where these children went, and I suspect for many of them it was nowhere good. I try to “keep an eye out” (as well as an ear), but they’re just gone. I don’t know what to do.

The unfriendly skies…. https://theothermccain.com/2023/06/26/checked-and-ready-for-boarding/

George is back…. https://spawnyspace.wordpress.com/2023/06/27/bad-to-the-bone/

The one that got away…. https://sylg1.wordpress.com/2023/06/26/true-detective-stories-395/

Honor your father…. https://sigmaframe.wordpress.com/2023/06/26/fathers-of-the-human-planet/

Not to emulate… https://winteryknight.com/2023/06/26/what-can-we-learn-about-communist-leaders-from-the-record-of-history-3/

Yay us!!!!… https://pushingrubberdownhill.com/2023/06/26/lets-hear-it-for-50-year-old-white-guys/

We’re all on the spectrum now…. https://www.scifiwright.com/2023/06/left-to-right-is-leftist/