A student is considered to be continuing truant after missing three or more class periods on three different days, according to Ramsey County and Minnesota statute 260A. Last year, 31% of Mounds View students met the Minnesota criteria to be habitually truant, which is when a student misses one or more class periods on seven separate school days. That means over 500 students had seven class periods or more of unexcused absences. This school year, Mounds View implemented plenty of new updates to school policy, many relating to attendance.
In previous years, students would get lunch detention for unexcused absences, but that was not enough of an incentive to attend class, with many students continuing to have unexcused absences. Some schools take away parking permits as a consequence for absences, but Principal Rob Reetz disagrees with that idea. “I don’t feel like taking away a kid’s ability to get to school for purposes of not going to class is smart … it would be totally ironic for us to suspend a kid from school for missing class, or to give them in-school suspension for missing class because that just results in more missed class.”
Instead, when a student is skipping class periods, the school will take away their phone for the remainder of the school day. After calling the student’s parent or guardian for their cooperation, the phone will be held in student services with Administrative Assistant Gary Swanson, and the student can pick it up before leaving. If a student does not own a phone or bring one to school, nothing extra will be done, but any original consequences that come with truancy still apply.
Each classroom now has a hall pass kiosk, making it easier for students and teachers to create and manage passes. This is a way to record passes more efficiently while reusing old Chromebooks. Bathroom passes are also shorter now, with the time given decreasing from seven minutes to five. According to Associate Principal Staci Souhan, too many students were misusing the passes, even by using the remaining time to walk around rather than go back to class. “Kids aren’t using them to go to the bathroom,” she said. “They think it’s just a walk-around pass.”
However, last year some students struggled to find an unlocked bathroom even within seven minutes. That will not be an issue this year because all bathroom doors will be unlocked. A common misconception is that the doors were locked to avoid the use of electronic cigarettes in bathrooms. They were never meant to be locked in the first place; the custodians would lock the doors after cleaning and forget to unlock them in the morning. To avoid that again, Reetz told the custodians to keep the doors unlocked after cleaning.
The use of electronic cigarettes continues to be a problem at Mounds View. An option to combat it was to buy a smoke detector in each bathroom, but those are expensive and could easily be damaged by students. Instead, Mounds View has a hand-held device that detects e-cigarette smoke. Throughout the day, staff check the bathrooms with the device and may catch people who use them. This has been in place for years, but has not been emphasized to the students until this year.
Mounds View has many emergency exit doors, but that also creates a safety concern regarding students leaving during the school day without staff knowledge or outsiders being let in. Students are required to only use the main entrance during the school day, and this year, they must scan in and out to ensure the school knows if a student is in or out of the building in case of an emergency. This new system helps record student presence more easily, including students who go to Irondale every day. “We are required to keep students safe, to know where they’re at, and then to keep our building safe,” Souhan said. “We know exactly who’s in the building and who’s not.”
From attendance policy to safety enforcement, these changes at Mounds View will have real effects on students and staff, whether they see these changes as helpful or restricting.