THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, August 25, 1995 TAG: 9508240149
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 06 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
SOURCE: Beth Barber
LENGTH: Medium: 75 lines
Public schools are asked to stand in loco parentis far too often for far too many kids. Teachers and administrators alike protest - and studies show they are correct - that they cannot take up all slack for neglectful, ineffectual or ignorant parents.
Yet even as educators here protest having to assume parental duties, and to beg for parental involvement, they adopt a school-at-tend-ance policy and guidelines (excerpted at bottom left) that presume educators know better than all parents when a child's absence(s) should be excused. They also give educators authority to fail a child despite excused absences and passing grades.
That's apparently fine by most members of the School Board; Don Bennis is a prominent exception. But it's not fine with some parents (see Letters at left). Here's why:
Under Superintendent Faucette, each school had its own attendance policy. That produced inconsistencies and confusion, prompting this return to a systemwide policy. OK.
But the harshness of the policy selected is more suited to a school district more troubled by students who skip classes and parents who skip parenting than is Virginia Beach as a whole. According to school officials, truancy is so much ``not a major problem'' here that the district hasn't kept figures on it. They estimate that unexcused absences account for fewer than 1% of all absences from school. Why, then, predicate the district's attendance policy on the presumptions that Beach students skip and their parents either don't or won't see that their kids attend school?
As for consistency, it could well decline, given the schools' discretion to accept or reject excuses for students' absences. The guidelines drawn by the administration to im-ple-ment the School Board-approved policy not only expect a parent ``to provide documentation of a student's absence.'' They also give the authority to reject that documentation to each school's principal, his or her designee(s) and an Attendance Waiver Committee com-posed of at least one administrator, one guidance counselor and three teachers.
Why this institutionalized distrust of parents?
There's more than a hint here of a pervasive and specious egalitarianism pervasive in education today. It's intended to help students who are ``at risk'' academically, a risk traced most often to indifferent or inadequate parenting, without ``stigmatizing'' them. But whom do educators think they're kidding? Not the kids: They know who's smarter than whom, and they know that socio-economic status is an undependable indicator. Besides, a stigma of illiteracy and its legacy of poverty are far worse than a temporary distinction of ``at risk.''
Yet this unwillingness to discriminate even for legitimate reason crops up in, among other things, opposition to ability grouping, in sex education more graphic than preteens from most homes need, in ``guidance counseling'' on very personal subjects without parental knowledge, must less consent. A system loath to acknowledge that some students are better than others is equally loath to acknowledge that some parents are better, too.
All students and parents in Virginia Beach aren't equally at risk of truancy and its consequences. The difference between a parent who doesn't check to see if her child is in school and the parent who gets his child to skating lessons or piano recitals or Europe is night and day. The child who skips classes he's already failing to just hang out is far different from the child who misses class for an extracurricular activity and still passes his classes.
And if a child can have what the regulations call ``extensive absences'' - excused or unexcused - and still excel academically, then the problem is not the child's truancy. It's the schools' inability to properly educate him. ILLUSTRATION: Graphic
School Board (Attendance) Policy 5-17
For copy of graphic, see microfilm
by CNB