Are you the type of kid that strolls into first period at 8:15, 8:20, or later? Then watch out because Oakton is starting to have a serious crackdown on attendance. In previous years, there has only been one teacher in charge of meeting with students and checking up on repeated tardiness. However, new this year is the establishment of the attendance team with Mr.Janis, Ms. Stewart, and Mr. Olivo.

For years now, there has been a referral system set up to make both parents and students well aware of the student’s attendance problems. In this system, after 3 or more unexcused tardies from a period, the teacher is supposed to notify the student’s parents and then write a referral. After the referral is filed, the attendance team is supposed to arrange a meeting with the student and their parents, and come up with a plan to facilitate the student getting to school on time. Currently, these meetings are based on the referrals of teachers, but meetings are automatically held with students who have one full day unexcused absence. However, a lot of students haven’t had these meetings as they’re intended to because most teachers don’t actually write the referrals. Writing the referrals can be quite time consuming and in many cases, teachers don’t feel as though the issues are serious enough to warrant a referral. Repeated cases of being 5 minutes late to first period are much less likely to frustrate teachers than lateness to other periods or later tardies. This is especially true for teachers of upperclassmen students, as most of them are responsible for their own transportation to school in the morning, so parents would mostly know the office is getting overwhelmed with the number of students

The student body had a brief glimpse of what Oakton is willing to do to curb attendance problems with the Cougar Time reforms implemented this year. Administration toyed with several ideas to prevent students from wasting Cougar Time outside the classroom ranging from having teachers sign specific forms to the extreme banning of Cougar Time all together. Luckily, the team in charge of Cougar Time landed on the option of having students register for Cougar Time during the week, but this evolution of Oakton’s free period demonstrated to much of the student population that attendance is a problem that administration will now go to great lengths to adjust and fix.

Recently, there have been some rumors going around that the referral system was going to be changing drastically. For example, the most popular rumor is  that the SIS system will be automatically creating referrals for students and others have said that privileges like parking spots will be revoked as a result of attendance issues. While it is true that there will be an attendance crackdown, none of these rumors are true. Attendance is still a huge problem at Oakton, so administration is highly motivated to do something about it. The attendance team has released a template for teachers writing referrals, to both streamline the process and encourage teachers to write attendance referrals for their students.

It’s true, Oakton has a serious attendance problem. Everyone knows it, and nothing has been done about it for a long time. However, the renewed efforts by the administrative team will hopefully have a positive influence on the attendance problems at our school.

**Article will be updated with more detailed and in-depth information on 2/27/18**