(a)Title: The Effect of Weekly Consequences on Student Tardies
(b) Needs Assessment: Tardies were a major issue at our campus last year. Tardies continued to rise as the 2010-2011 school year progressed. Tardies were tracked through the “tardy table” and the data was analyzed every six weeks and students were called down to the office when available by AP’s when time permitted. This system seemed to have minimal effect on students attempt to improve on tardies. Tardy numbers were higher during 6th and 8th period. Other periods were averaging 10-20 tardies per day while 6th and 8th period was averaging 20-25 per day.
(c) Objective and Vision: The vision is to create a way to give the students a more immediate consequence to catch tardies earlier and reduce the number of tardies. Action research will be used to make improvements on student tardies. Data will be collected from last year’s attendance reports and compared to this year’s attendace report. To help improve the tardies, students will be gven a consequence every week for the number of tardies they have. Students will be given a consequence for their 5th tardy instead of waiting until the end of the six weeks to give a consequence. Reports will be run to see if improvements are being made when compared to last year’s data.
(d) Review of Literature and Action Research Strategy: To ensure that I had plenty of options to improve the tardy numbers at our schools I researched different schools with similar problems with attendance and found different strategies I could use to help the research. Randy Sprick gave the idea to have consequences that were more immediate therefore bringing the problem to the students attention while it is fresh on their mind (Sprick, 2007.) I also looked for ways to handle the consequence end of the tardies. Together with the administration team we decided to go with a graduated consequence scale. (NEA Today, 2001.) The administration team also considered giving a consequence that included manual labor, but for reasons due to budgeting were unable to commit resources to this type of program. Only the administration team and myself were included in the decision to use the graduated consequence for tardies and the weekly consequence.
(e) Articulate the Vision: The goal of the new tardy program was communicated to the students via P.A. All students were given an explanation during the first week of school and again during the third week of school in the student behavior presentation. The program was also communicated to the staff through email. Data was provided and used to back up reasoning for this type of consequence.
(f) Manage the Organization: Through several meeting s assignments were given to several staff members to help the program run smoothly. I was put in charge of assigning the main consequence such as after school detention and in school suspension. All assistant pricipals were to help with students who were repeat offenders. The school secretary was in charge of creating a list of students who were to stay after school for detention and to create a list of students who did not attend after school detention. Student aids were used to hand write office request and bring students down to the office to receive their consequence.
(g) Manage Operations: Since the project needed much help from other people and a need for a central command was not necessary, a type of collaborative meeting was held to work out all the problems that may have arised or arise in the course of the project. The task were not assigned but a volunteer system was used and each task was taken care of. Phone calls would be done by the assistant principals and myself, paper work was to be done by school secretaries.
(h) Respond to Community Interest and Needs: In our school time management is not a topic of frequent discussion at home with out students. Bringing the tardy issue to the forefront and making students aware of it will help them become better prepared to be productive members of society. Any anctivy or project that the school does that can improve productivity of our students will better the community. Hopefully parents will begin to understand the importance and begin talking to the students about time management and its importantance in life.
References
Sprick, R. (2007, October). Taming the Tardies. Retrieved from http://www.safeandcivilschools.com/research/articles/tamingtardies.pdf
NEA Today. (2011 , September). How to Handle Chronic Tardies. Retrieved from http://kcsos.kern.org/schcom/stories/storyReader$82?reload
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