Recently a Philadelphia school was exposed and accused of students being absent at the time of their class, but they were marked present in the school.
Thomas A. Edison High School, located in North Philadelphia has a 2-way system to mark attendance. One is swiping their cards and going through a metal detector when they enter the school. The next attendance is taken by the class teacher in the roll call.
Surprisingly, it was found that only 75% of students whose cards were swiped were actually at school and when the class attendance register was checked, the rate shockingly went to 36%. It is expected that the remaining 64% are roaming in the halls, chatting on stairways or not even on the campus, but no one would know, as the school marks them present.
Nearly two dozen students at the school have been found unaccounted for. A senior who has attended 90% of school on paper has actually gone to his class only 50%. A freshman, who has accounted for coming to 100 days school has actually been at the school only 12 days.
Fake attendance issues all over North Philadelphia
This exposed the flaws of the school management not only in a school, were many other schools in North Philadelphia. Ever since the city council members have been pressuring the Philadelphia School District to release the attendance records, which they are hesitating to give and have refused to comment much on the situation.
Chief Schools Officer, Shawn Bird feels that the class attendance is more error-prone, as they are done manually and teachers don’t take their roll calls properly. However, the council members think that if the schools are not at fault, they shouldn’t hesitate to release the data.
On this issue as pressing and disturbing like this, the school board and Mayor Jim Kenney has decided not to comment on this issue. Parents who drop their schools every day at the school are highly tensed by the issue as they feel it is the duty of the school to inform if a particular student is not attending the classes.
