[Mpls] Taking attendance at an MPS high school

[Brionna Harder]

Hey everyone. . .

Having just ended the first week of school and procrastinating terribly to 
avoid the grading before me this weekend, I thought I'd add a bit of 
perspective to the enrollment issue.  At our school and many others (if not 
all), we are required to submit E counts.  (E meaning enrollment, I assume)  
At the high school level all second hour teachers do an E count for the 
first few weeks of the school year.  The reality is that many students 
change schools in the first couple of weeks OR do not show up until someone 
notices they are not in school after a week or two in.

Attendance and E counts are done electronically on a district-wide web-based 
system called Discovery.  All week, at our site, it took an obscenely long 
time to take attendance and just finally started to speed up.  Some teachers 
were still having a hard time taking attendance and doing their E counts 
today. We (teaching staff) were told that there were kinks needing to be 
worked out.  Hopefully, those kinks will be worked out next week.

Enrollment changes incredibly and daily.  For instance, one year I taught I 
started out with 116 students in my four Civics classes and by April had 
lost 48 students to other schools and gained 32 new students.  Plus, I have 
had several students who have changed schools three or four (or more) times 
in one school year.

I guess my point is this. . . providing an enrollment number at anytime is 
providing a number which may change slightly by the next day.  And, 
particularly at the beginning of the school and even more so with this 
school year starting before Labor Day, providing an enrollment number on day 
one would not provide an accurate number.

Brionna Harder
Cathedral Hill

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