New look at attendance

Antonia Seltzer
Students eagerly wait for Christopher Lopez to announce the next winner.

Jesus Martinez, Reporter
January 12, 2016

Be here, every day, all day, all the way, is the new initiative to improve attendance. The Ysleta Independent School District (YISD) overlooks the student attendance accounting system at every campus, to meet with the Texas Education Agency (TEA) standards. Students need to be accurately accounted for funding purposes.

Attendance plays a major role for credit and graduation purposes, administration tries its best to get students to attend school, including rewarding them for coming.

“We started discussing the policy in summer, and started thinking of better ways to motivate students to attend class,” assistant principal Mr. Guerra said.

The initiative represents responsibility for student education for the coming years.

“I came up with the initiative,” Guerra said.

Rewarding students may play a major role in this, because most people like being rewarded, especially after doing something good.

“The pizza party helped reward students who were doing the right thing,” Guerra said.

The new initiative could have a great effect if it works as planned. It should get more students interested in attending school, if they know something great will come of it.

“Attendance numbers have increased, when students are in school they tend to be more successful in their classes,” Guerra said.

The meaning of attendance has changed drastically over the years, from not needing to go to school, to only going if you wanted, being able to drop out and now it is the most important factor for schools, beside the education rankings.

“We are four percent higher from previous years, our goal  is to be at 96 percent by the end of the year and to be number one in the district,” Guerra said.  

Students get rewarded around every nine weeks, the first nine weeks students with perfect attendance got popcorn and for the second nine weeks there was a raffle to win other prizes.

“Getting back from winter break we will have another raffle to win $25 gift cards to Starbucks, for students with two absences or less,” Guerra said.