As of today, we are at 525 students, a drop of 8 since last week. Basically I believe the drops have occurred not so much due to the holiday, but due to students who received progress reports showing less than 50% of work completed. In some cases, we are able to council the student, talk with parents and send them back to class with a somewhat renewed determination to pull up their grades if the teacher thinks it possible. In the cases where students are coming and not working at all (20-30%), some have stopped showing up. I think we’ll see a few more of these before the week is out. We also had a couple of drops due to absences caused by illness: whooping cough (!), a stomach flu that made the rounds, etc.
On another note, we are all working to deal with some immature 9th grade behavior, primarily by boys: throwing things, blurting out inappropriate comments, confronting teachers, basically lack of impulse control and self-awareness. The challenge with the 9th grade classes is that many of the students have not yet matured enough since the end of school in May to handle succeeding in the classroom environment. I can see the wisdom of the smaller 9th grade classroom since we are at 30+, especially in English, and it can be quite a challenge to have so many at-risk students in an academically concentrated environment. However, for the most part, we are doing well in keeping these students in school. The teachers have been very cooperative in accepting students back in the class after I have worked with them and their parents, and I am really grateful for this. The key will be to see how many have passed.
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