DATE: Friday, March 14, 1997                TAG: 9703130359

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B03  EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: EDUCATION 

SOURCE: BY DENISE WATSON, STAFF WRITER 

DATELINE: NORFOLK                           LENGTH:  121 lines

NORFOLK HOPES TO LOWER SCHOOL ABSENTEE RATES OFFICIALS ARE FOCUSING ON CHRONIC SKIPPERS

The old Gavon Ruiz, 14, was legendary for skipping school. The Northside Middle School seventh-grader has lost count of the number of days he's missed over the years.

``My best friends peer-pressured me,'' Gavon said.

``They'd say `Come on, let's go joy-riding, hang out.' I'd pretend like I was going to school and then I'd go with them.''

But he was caught, and a day in court, Gavon said, turned him around.

The old Gavon is a problem baffling Norfolk administrators: how to keep students, facing various distractions, in school.

Nearly one-fifth to one-third of the district's middle and high school students missed at least 18 days last year - 10 percent of the school year.

While absenteeism has been an ongoing issue for the district, it will receive more attention this September as Norfolk begins its Quality Schools Initiative, which will include goals teachers, principals and school administrators must meet.

In studying variables such as classroom instruction, test scores and attendance to set the goals, school officials analyzed attendance data to find those chronically absent. They were alarmed by the results:

All middle schools and high schools had double-digit absenteeism, as did several elementary schools.

Absenteeism jumped dramatically once students entered middle school. An average of 6.3 percent of elementary students missed at least 18 days but that number leaped to 22.8 percent in middle school and 33.8 percent in high school.

Schools with higher percentages of students on free or reduced-price lunch generally had higher rates of absenteeism.

``It gives me heartburn,'' said Tom Lockamy, assistant superintendent for academic affairs and accountability.

``But we're going to address it.''

School officials say attendance has improved during the past two years with a stricter attendance policy that can prevent students from being promoted if they miss 10 days of a semester-long course and 20 days or more in a school year.

The current analysis, however, comes from a nontraditional look at the data, said Jeff Schiller, a consultant with Instructional & Accountability Systems, which is helping Norfolk develop its accountability plan.

Consultants looked for students missing a ``significant'' amount of school - 18 days - instead of looking at an ``average of attendance,'' a calculation showing the percentage of days students are present at the school.

``We heard administrators who kept insisting that they had a serious attendance problem but the numbers didn't show it,'' Schiller said.

``To say `We have 93 percent attendance,' that's a very traditional way of looking at it. You can have a high average daily attendance but have a lot of kids absent chronically.''

Norfolk's average attendance is comparable to some other South Hampton Roads cities. For example, Norfolk's average attendance for the 1995-96 school year was 95 percent for kindergarten to seventh-graders, and 89 percent for eighth to 12th.

Portsmouth's was 95 and 91 percent, Suffolk's 95 and 91 percent, Virginia Beach's 96 and 95 percent, and Chesapeake's 96 and 93 percent.

Schiller said dissecting the numbers is the best way to gauge the extent of an attendance problem.

Norfolk ``is looking at all the data this way, trying to figure out what the problems are,'' Schiller said.

``If any school system looks at the numbers that way, they'd get similar results.''

Officials in and outside the schools list various reasons for poor attendance. Some factors include transportation and social problems facing many poorer families. Many aren't surprised with the leap between elementary and middle school:

Elementary school students move from more intimate environments of 300 to 400 students to middle-school settings of 1,000 or more students, where students shift more with class changes and teacher-student contact isn't as personable.

In addition, ``hormones'' and puberty kick in, making it more difficult for children to focus on schoolwork.

``The older kids get, they're able to assert themselves more,'' said deputy superintendent Frank Sellew. ``They play hooky, things elementary kids don't necessarily get into.''

Discipline problems also affect attendance. Most out-of-school suspensions and expulsions, which factor into absences, occur in middle and high school. There were about 14,000 suspensions and expulsions last year; the average suspension lasts three days.

Getting to school, for many middle and high schoolers, also becomes a logistical problem. Most elementary students walk to or are bussed to schools close to their neighborhoods. But many middle and high school students are transported across the city for class.

``If a student lives in Berkley and goes to Lake Taylor and misses the bus, it's too far for him to walk to school,'' said Wilbert Lewis, a parent technician at Blair, Ruffner, and Lafayette-Winona Middle Schools.

John Horton, who works with Norfolk Domestic and Juvenile Courts, has spent years working with students who are at risk of dropping out of school.

``The overwhelming reason I found for students not going to school was that there was no one strong enough, tough enough, with enough conviction to make that child get up and go to school,'' Horton said.

He found that many of the parents hadn't graduated from high school, some hadn't finished middle school, and many didn't have ``good'' jobs. There wasn't a strong appreciation for education in those families, Horton said.

``You have a sense of hopelessness. Maybe that's why they didn't wake the kids up.''

Some schools are targeting truancy by working with families and communities. Administrators at Rosemont Middle School, for example, have asked neighboring residents to serve as ``bus stop buddies'' and to call the school when they spot students leaving the school grounds or loitering in the neighborhood. Schools are often using parent technicians to work with families of chronically truant students to get to the root of the absences.

``Without that community and family support,'' said Rosemont Principal Melanie Yules, ``you don't have the whole village raising the child.'' ILLUSTRATION: Photo illustration by JIM COLLINS

[Photo]

John Horton, Norfolk

[Chart]

The Virginian-Pilot

SCHOOL ATTENDANCE 1995-1996

[For copy of chart, see microfilm]

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