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K12 recruiting and hiring retention

ABSENCES & LOST INSTRUCTIONAL TIME

When students or teachers are out of the classroom, learning comes to a halt. And while student attendance has long been a subject of study, it only tells part of the story.  We know that student absences negatively impact learning and achievement, but what about staff absences?

Let’s take a look at the numbers for both students and educators to get the full picture of chronic absenteeism’s impact on lost instructional time.

Absence Management

Sources:
Employee absence data from Frontline Research & Learning Institute
U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights, “2013-2014 Civil Rights Data Collection: A First Look,” (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Education, June 2016) 

With so much instructional time lost between student and teacher absences, what can school districts do to reduce the impact on student achievement?

  THE FIRST STEP. . .

…to reducing the impact of teacher absences on student learning is reliably tracking daily attendance for staff. This is a crucial step — in fact, it’s so important that Rhode Island even specified chronic absenteeism (for both students and teachers) as a key indicator in their State Plan.

So how do you track teacher attendance and ensure that your people are in the classroom as much as possible? With Frontline Absence & Time, employee attendance management is a breeze. You get access to real-time employee absence data, enabling you to keep up with trends and build proactive strategies.

Our solution gives you insight into how many teacher absences are driven by your district or school. The numbers may surprise you: the Frontline Research & Learning Institute shows that for employees requiring a substitute, a full 21% of absences were for professionally-related reasons. More than half of those were specifically for professional development.

Once you have insights like these, you can plan ahead so that you can provide educators with plenty of professional learning opportunities and support, without causing a substitute shortage.

“One of my goals which coincides with increasing student attendance is increasing staff attendance. I have been greatly utilizing the Frontline attendance data to learn why our average daily staff attendance rate is lower with some types of staff members than it is other types of staff members. What particular days are they taking? When are they taking those days, and how is this impacting the education of our students?”

– Dr. Richard Labbe, Superintendent, Sayreville Public Schools

  TwoTHE Second STEP. . .

. . . is making sure that when teachers are out of the classroom — whether due to illness, PD or anything else — a qualified substitute is ready to step in and carry the baton. Frontline’s Absence Management system helps you find the right substitute with skill-matching and preference lists. And teachers can make sure that substitutes have the resources they need to continue student learning by attaching notes, seating charts, lesson plans and anything else to the absence itself.

Plus, you can be sure that every substitute working in your classrooms has the skills they need to succeed with our substitute training course library.

  • Ensure that every substitute knows how to behave professionally, manage a classroom, give lessons and work with a diverse student body.
  • Let substitutes access online trainings directly from the Absence Management system.
  • Track substitutes’ progress as they work through the interactive courses on their own time.
  • Reduce substitute “incidents” and “do not use” requests.