FARMINGTON — Superintended Christian Elkington unveiled on Tuesday, Sept. 26, Regional School Unit 9’s plan for the 2023-2024 school year to improve attendance and reduce chronic absenteeism.

The theme of the plan is “Every Day in School Matters” and its two long-term goals are to reduce the rate of chronic absenteeism by 50% by spring 2026 and to improve the overall daily attendance for all schools in the district by 5%.

“Attendance is the key to everything,” Elkington shared with the board. “You can’t be in school, you can’t learn, you can’t eat. If you can’t be at school, you can’t do a lot of things.”

Elkington shared with the directors in August that all seven district schools have seen rising chronic absenteeism over the past six years and his administration was formulating a plan to address it. In his data, he showed that Mt. Blue High School had the highest rate at 38.95% in 2022-2023. By contrast, in 2017-18 it was 28.63%.

One way which Elkington believes will help reduce the problem is properly identifying why students are not coming to school through their attendance code. At the meeting, Elkington stated the district originally had over 40 different attendance codes to explain a student’s absence.

“We looked at all our 47 different attendance codes and said, ‘Whoa, there’s just way too many of these codes for why students might be out’,” he told the board.

Elkington believes the first step should be gathering data, but the high number of attendance codes made collecting data and formally identifying an issue difficult given how spread out the data was among the many different codes. According to Elkington, his administration reduced the number of attendance codes to 20.

Elkington also shared a poster that will be circulated in schools and sent home to parents that identify the factors that would warrant a student being kept home from school, such as illness, doctor’s appointments, family emergencies, religious observations, pre-approved family/educational trips and unplanned education disruption.

“I assume that the target audience are students, correct?” Director J. Jeffrey Barnum of New Vineyard asked the superintendent, to which he said yes.

“I mean, it lists all the reasons why you don’t have to be in school, legitimate reasons,” Barnum continued. “Should there not be another poster that lists all the reasons why you shouldn’t be?”

Elkington agreed, adding “I’m just going to be quite honest, we have a lot of difficulty because several of our parents think that they can have their students out for any reason they want, and so we’re trying to make it very clear to those reasons as I listed to them are what is in statute.”

“And don’t get me wrong,” he continued. “It is a parent’s decision to do that, but this is one of those times where under the statute, you’re not supposed to keep your child home [for illegitimate reasons] because they have a right to a free education and are supposed to be in school.”