[Mpls] Taking attendance at an MPS high school

[Socialist2001 at cs.com]

In a message dated 9/3/2004 6:27:00 PM Central Daylight Time, 
brioharder at msn.com writes:

<< 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.
  >>

What you seem to concerned with is the validity of the numbers rather than 
the accuracy of the numbers. An accurate number may not be a valid number for 
some purposes. As far as I know, funding from the state is based on the number 
of students who are enrolled and attending classes on a particular day in 
October.  The schools don't get money for students who are not in school on head 
count day, but show up other days.

It is possible to provide an accurate number of students who are enrolled and 
attending day 1 of school, day 2, etc. If the district now has an E counting 
system (E as in electronic or Email perhaps?), and everybody is correctly 
counting heads and inputting the data, the head office has daily attendance 
figures and useful breakdowns of those figures by the end of each day. Decisions 
about cutting teacher positions due to lower than expected enrollment are usually 
made within the first few weeks of school. The E count system will probably 
speed up that decision-making process. 

-Doug Mann, King Field
Mann for school board
www.educationright.com