Innovation at Dalat #12 Student Absences

Sometimes too much of a good thing is actually not a good thing…like when you have just a little too much frosting on your piece of cake!  Perhaps that is not the best example since I have never had too much frosting! How about too much exercise? How about too much innovation at school?

As Dalat has grown, so have the number of great opportunities for students to learn outside of the classroom.  Between sports trips, Impact trips, band/choir trips, class trips, Forensics & History Bowl trips, and academic field trips, there are a lot of great reasons for kids to travel the world and miss classes. In spite of our best efforts to schedule things carefully and do what we can to minimize the negative impacts of these outings they do add up to have an impact on the other primary thing that we do at Dalat…teaching classes.

Dalat has reached a sort of “tipping point” where the drawbacks of all the time out of the classrooms have begun to outweigh some of the positives of all of these great opportunities. Teachers have rightly expressed concern that you cannot teach students who are not present, and it is difficult to move forward with the curriculum when many students are away for extended times. Add to this the fatigue factor for students who are constantly trying to catch up from their last outing, and the cost to parents who are trying to pay for all of the enrichment activities and you arrive at the need to make some adjustments.

This is where we found ourselves this semester. Long discussions ensued. These are not easy decisions because sometimes it means “saying no” to great opportunities. But in the end, several policies to try and help will be implemented for next year:

Adjustments

• The biggest change that students must be aware of and plan for is that they will be allowed a maximum of three major trips (two or more nights) in a school year. Students who are involved in multiple sports or other activities may need to make some decisions about what their priorities are and if they are adding an Impact trip, what will they be giving up. The only exception that will not be tallied toward the three trips is the senior sneak in which all students are strongly encouraged to attend.
• Each varsity sports team will be allowed a maximum of two trips per year. One can be the longer ACSC trips, but the other will be limited to a single overnight.
• The administration will work to schedule events so that multiple trips happen at the same time so that everyone is gone at once. This means that everyone is back in the classroom together.
• There are several other scheduling and organizing internal adjustments from multiple departments that will also be implemented.  We will evaluate next year if further changes will be needed.

Here are other notes to continue to be aware.

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Our final exam time in high school is important enough that we do not allow a students to be absent from exams or reschedule. We end sports and most activities early to give students study time. Students are not given permission to leave early or reschedule exams in any way except in extraordinary extenuating circumstances.
      
 Our absence policy does allow parents to decide to miss up to eight days of class in a semester without penalty. While we don’t encourage this, we also know that life happens outside of school and there are good reasons why a family may need to miss a few days throughout the semester. However, unless there are serious medical or personal emergencies that fall outside of the control of the family, we have held to the standard that grades are dropped by 10% if a student misses more than eight of a particular class in a semester. School-sponsored absences for trips do not count towards this policy. There is more information about this in our parent and student handbook.

As always, we welcome your feedback. Let me know if you have any questions.