During this pandemic — with all the isolating and rules around not attending school with even a sniffle — the class absences must have been through the roof at schools in the Sea to Sky, right?
Turns out, not so much.
The Chief asked School District 48 for the data on class attendance for the last few years, and the findings may not be what you would expect.
To be clear, the statistics show the number of times students were absent from a class, not the number of students absent.
They include Squamish, Whistler and Pemberton schools.
Class attendance is taken in each class at each individual school.
In elementary schools, attendance is generally taken once in the morning. In middle and high schools, attendance is taken in each period.
The big picture data looks like this:
Total class absence records for 2019: 318,264
Total class absence records for 2020: 218,777
Total class absence records for 2021: 164,762
“There is a significant downward trend in total class absence numbers, but there are some important reasons for this,” said the district’s data technician, Scott McLagan, in an email to The Chief.
“Firstly for the 2021 school year, our middle and high schools, in order to minimize human contact and improve contact tracing, switched from four periods per day to two periods which effectively halves the number of possible class absences per student,” he said.
“Secondly, we introduced a new attendance code of ‘offsite.’ When a student is marked with ‘offsite’ they are considered to be actively engaged in instruction but they are at home — if they were asked to isolate, they were able to join classes online — or somewhere other than in a school, so these records aren’t considered as absences at all.”
Offsite records were not tallied for either the report card or Permanent Student Record and are not included in the above data.
McLagan said that it should also be noted that hundreds of students joined the online program and transition program during COVID-19.
