Wait, so do they have classes on the Saturdays? How does that work?

Something tells me your situation is not the same as their's

I had to apply for this exact thing. I had a two period work study on my schedule that the office counted as truancy for a whole year. Had no idea until I got a notice from my counselor that I wasn't getting my diploma because of it. I didn't know I was going to walk until an hour before the ceremony.

I'm a teacher in Texas. A lot of my seniors have this make up hours sheet they have to fill out at the end of their senior year to prevent having to attend extra days of school. If they don't have their hours, they can't move on.

As someone who attended high school in Texas, they give you a ton of time to make it up. There’s 2 months at the end of the semester dedicated to make up time. Teachers monitor classes for several hours after and before school. You can work with the janitorial crew until 11 on week nights to make up hours they have 8 hours of monitored time to make up on Saturdays and also summer hours. Most schools give you every opportunity to make it up. I had a shit ton of truancy hours to make up my junior year and it was doable. Plus they have truant officers that work for the district and meet with you if you are close or you go over. Like you aren’t caught off guard by this stuff.

Edit: People really seems to be focused on the Janitor part. That was merely one option. The only people I saw doing that were people who were severely behind on hours. These are also unexcused absences that you are required to make up.

We had that in my county in MD for awhile, you'd get an incomplete with like 5 or 10 unexcused absences in a semester. I think they got rid of it my senior year and no one went to class. Brought back almost immediately

Edit- unexecused not unexpected. Basically needed a sick note

If we took away attendance requirements then half the kids would stop coming to school altogether. Their parents, if they have any, dont care about education. It is pretty much impossible to fail out of high school as it is. The bar to get a diploma is already resting on the floor. We dont need to dig a hole just to lower it further.

I taught in a district that did not enforce attendance law at all. Many of my students had 100+ days absent per year. My average daily attendance was 65%. There really isn't that much you can accomplish as a teacher when students are not showing up.

Should at least have a waiver if your grades arent shit.

High School isnt just about learning math/english/history/science/etc, that's why attendance matters.

If you skip all your classes and still get good grades, you still only got half the intended education highschool is meant to give.

The other half being social skills and how to be a functional adult in society.

Learning stuff like "show up on time", "hand in assignments on time", "adhere to a dress code", "wake up in the morning", "picking random fights with people is bad", etc etc, is honestly the more important skills you get from high school.

If they get good grades but often skip school, they arent learning all those tangible life skills on how to not be a total dipshit in life.

Thats how you end up with stuck up smartasses at your job who know stuff but can't handle something as basic as how to act respectfully towards others.

Is it artificial though? Missing 10% of your work days without a good reason will absolutely get you fired

Artificial barrier to success that is preventing people from moving on in life.

If you have a 90% attendance rate at work you're getting fired. That's an essential life skill, not an artificial barrier.

I disagree. 90% of school days for 9 months is about 18 days off of allowed time. I grew up on 10 days as our threshold, they have almost twice as many, and my entire class managed to graduate. Nobody owes them a diploma, and they knew the rules. How about some personal accountability on their part.

Its not sick days or excused absences. Its just ditching. If you cant go without missing a day every two weeks, you dont deserve to graduate.

An "artificial barrier"? I would say that showing up only 90% of the time is a pretty reasonable barrier. If you show up less than 90% of the time to pretty much anything else in your life, you will suffer consequences as well.

If you KNOW you only need to attend 90% of the time and still can't be bothered, maybe you shouldn't be allowed to graduate.

I hope to god you just forgot the /s the "barriers" to graduating HS are a absolute joke and if you can't even meet those then you don't deserve to graduate.

Part of school is preparing you for a career. Not too many jobs are going to keep you in if you can't manage to show up on a regular basis.

Gotta actually show up and learn if you want to graduate. Not really stupid.

What’s stupid is punishing the 5 of 33 who managed to hit the completely reasonable attendance target.

According to CBS affiliate KWTX, 28 of 33 seniors at Marlin High School did not meet graduation requirements, and their attendance records and grades are to blame.

Isn't school suppose to prepare you for life?

For most companies you work for.. if you were absent for 10% of your days scheduled to work, you wouldnt be working there long.

That costs money. A lot of communities can't or won't pay for this kind of support

Not if they can help it. If a student fails a class (which is difficult to do on its own), they provide additional remediation.

Middle school - the end of year packet. It's a full workbook for the class. If they finish it, they pass they class.

High school - an online credit recovery program. They complete the online course and they pass the class.

If the student doesn't do this, then the failure stands and they have to retake the course. I still had classes full of seniors, retaking a freshmen science class.

In middle school it is incredibly rare to have a student repeat a grade, they are typically just "placed" in the next grade.

Thanks to No Child Left Behind, no they don't. School funding is tied to students passing, so for a school to fail a student they'd be cutting their own funding. They're being incentivised to pass students no matter what. So school admins put in these policies to basically force teachers to give students infinite chances, if they put in even the tiniest amount of effort then it's almost impossible to fail. Teachers have no way of holding the kids accountable for anything and the kids grow up learning nothing and having no concept of failure

I’m not American but I did fail math all the way from 8th to 11th grade. The teachers knew I was failing the entire time, they had eyes after all. But they were just swamped. It was a large class size, limited time, and the teachers had to teach according to the pace of the average student. I was just a little bit slower, I needed math taught to me with smaller and simpler steps explained, and a lot more practice than many of my classmates. But math is cumulative, you need algebra for basic calculus for advanced calculus. The pace just had to be a bit faster than mine, and the distance would grow more and more with each passing year.

All the teachers had time for was to teach at the average pace, give out exercises and then give out the answers. They were already overworked and couldn’t do more. The weaker students couldn’t understanding the teaching, so they couldn’t do the exercises, so they just left it blank and then blindly copied the answers.

Putting me in remedial classes that was 2 hours every week didn’t work, it wasn’t enough help. What made me pass by 12th grade was putting me in a class of just 8 students instead of 25, all students in dire need of math help. They gave us an amazing teacher who could explain math in those dumbed-down ways I never saw any other teacher manage to. He was a coach for the school’s math olympiad team which regularly made to the world/internationals, so he basically split his time between the brightest and dullest math students. Those were his only two responsibilities, so he had the time. There was no blind copying of answers, he wouldn’t let any one of us off until we could actually do the exercises. Sometimes that meant summer classes where we would work on one type of problem for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, until we finally understood by the end of the week. He made up for 4 years of sitting in class with a blank mind, within 1 year.

You are right that it is a flaw of the system, but I hesitate to blame any one teacher, because some of us really need that intense level of attention and expertise, which I’m sure many US public schools lack.

I doubt young couples are moving to Marlin and young people who graduated there got out and never looked back.

My graduating class was in the 40s but usual for that school was 60s and sometimes 70s.

Sometimes you just get a small class

There's no way to say this without sounding like a dick, but with as little judgement as possible:

What the fuck is going on in Ohio?

I spent a week driving between the Cincinnati and Columbus areas and I felt like I was in a emotional wasteland. Everyone I met was a teenager or 50+ and no one was having a good time. Everyone hated their jobs and also were bad at them. Smiles were hollow. The sky was cloudy. I began to doubt my reality.

Was that a typical experience?

Reinvestment in infrastructure and jobs training for federal infrastructure projects would go a long way.

The interior of our nation needs a new new deal. Too bad that’s socialism and therefore evil.

Oh yeah they’ve been big mad since the Civil Rights Act was passed.

Yeah it's messed up. Some kids purposefully transfer to high schools with low academic standards just to be in the top 10% or I guess top 6% these days, although that leads them to be entirely unprepared for college when they get there.

so they went to other schools in the UT system to transfer in to Austin later.

This is by design and a direct consequence of the 10% and even the 6% rule.

Large numbers of graduates from high schools that did not really prepare them for rigorous schools like UT or A&M must be admitted by law. The top schools (UT Austin and A&M College Station) know with precision and certainty that a % of freshman will completely bomb and wash out as a result - and I don't think it is a coincidence that the really competitive programs like engineering and business have weed out classes freshman year.

So UT Austin parks the kids they would have let in based on academic performance and SATs if there were no rule at UT San Antonio, A&M uses Blinn.

UT Austin literally has a program where they tell some kids they send to UTSA that as long as they maintain decent grades (I think around a 3.2) they are guaranteed admission to UT Austin their sophomore year.

My graduating class had 1200 kids in 2000, the joke was 3.9. GPa wasn’t in the ten percent.

Oh, well hopefully the school is well funded. It would be silly if the state determined how much funding to give the school based on, I dunno, property taxes. Haha, if they did that they would just have a self perpetuating cycle of poverty.

Median??? Holy crap. They means a lot are under that amount people...

Maybe they should aim a little lower. Try "committed to passable" for a bit and see how everyone feels about that

The fact that they let it get to this point where they have to push back graduation confirms that they certainly are not “committed to excellence,” sounds pretty fucking mediocre if you ask me. Measures should have been implemented much earlier in the year to ensure students weren’t skipping class so much that it would jeopardize graduation. But then again, it would take an intelligent person to forecast such a scenario and take corrective action. I’m starting to think that intelligence is a rarity in the “great” state of Texas.

But it says their absences AND grades were to blame? So it sounds like this isn’t actually spiteful at all, and it sounds like many of them did not in fact have the grades to pass…

Almost happened to me due to all 4 of my grandparents and an aunt dying of separate causes my senior year. I had great grades but kept leaving town for funerals. I had to get an override.

My guess is he wasn't scheduled to take PE, and as a result, he didn't take PE. But that's just a guess.

Interesting. Didn't know this was a thing. Thanks.