Nice of you to stop by

 Nice of you to stop by

Absences are high in public schools.   Achievement is low.  The State Superintendent of Schools in Maryland has a couple of miracle programs that she is sure will fix the latter.   So far, politicians have defaulted to that age-old cure all, appoint a committee to study the problem to fix the former.

It’s not clear what needs to be studied.  Of course, it will be surprising if “blame it on the pandemic” doesn’t show up as a cause.  Five years out that is our still go to reason for problems.

The Maryland State Department of Education has five legal reasons for not coming to school: death of a close family member, illness, religious holiday, unsafe transportation, court appearance.    Family outings, family vacations, family celebrations are not among them.  For some reason, families are unhappy with poor achievement but fail to see the connection between attending school and learning.  Oh, right, blame it on the pandemic when that great oxymoron “virtual learning” became the balm everyone accepted.

One of the legal reasons for school absence is unsafe transportation.   That reason allows school districts to not transport to school and, therefore, schools to close when weather emergencies interfere with safe transportation.   However, if you attend high school in Baltimore City, there is no safe transportation even on a sunny spring day.   Baltimore City is the only school district in Maryland that does not provide safe transportation for its high school students.   These kid use public transportation which is neither good nor safe.   It takes some students almost two hours each way to get to school. Students are routinely harassed on public transportation and some have even been assaulted. No wonder there are too many days when a warm bed looks so much better.   Teachers will tell you that too often the kids are barely awake before 2^nd or 3^rd period.   Baltimore City has zoned schools and all-City schools.   The All-City schools are open to anyone in the city.  Sone of these schools require certain academic standards, others may offer a unique program that isn’t available elsewhere.    The City will tell you that because of these All-City schools, providing district transportation is just impossible.  Surely City administrators could figure this out if they wanted to.   And before we take the usual default, there isn’t money, the State pays a large share of the transportation costs depending on the number of children transported.   Then there is the question, what do all these absences cost the students and the City?

Poor school attendance is a huge problem for the schools in Maryland.  Most folks would worry about this, but we will soon have a committee to investigate that so assuming the committee members will stop by and attend, we can check that off our worry list.