Attendance Up, Encouraged At Philadelphia Schools
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) - Philadelphia schools saw an uptick in attendance last school year.
Superintendent William Hite put it simply…
"It's very hard to teach children to read and to do math if they're not present."
And the district says more of them were present last year: 42 percent of students attended at least 95 percent of the time. That's up three percent from the 2014-15 school year.
Hite says one strategy was sending letters to parents, comparing their child's attendance to their neighborhood average:
"One of the reasons I know the letters home worked is because people were stopping me on the street and saying, 'I got a letter from you'."
Hite says high school attendance is the lowest, and the district this year will be focusing on getting 9th graders to school.