Schools around America have a problem: students aren’t going. 

Chronic absenteeism, the name of this epidemic, has become prevalent in the vocabulary of teachers, advisors, and principals who want to correct the issue in their classrooms. The topic has also become increasingly pressing due to the detrimental effects of being absent over long periods of time. 

Chronic absenteeism has been directly linked to worse performance in school and the trend didn’t fully fledge until post-pandemic, after students became accustomed to distance learning. According to USA Today, “Though educators and advocates hoped attendance would improve after the instability of the pandemic, in many cases it has become more pervasive and intractable. From 2018 to 2023, the rate of chronic absenteeism nearly doubled, from 15% to 26%.” 

To combat this problem at Rock Ridge, Student Support Advisor Elizabeth Bush, in coordination with the local Positive Behavioral Intervention and Supports Committee (PBIS), created an attendance competition after seeing the effects of absenteeism in students. “The chronic absenteeism rate for Rock Ridge High School was around 16 percent, and we are looking to get that under 10 percent by the end of this year,” Bush said. 

The first and last classes of every A and B day compete for the highest attendance rate from early Oct. to Nov. 26, when Thanksgiving break starts. The class with the highest attendance wins a class prize of their choosing including donuts, popcorn, and candy. “Across the nation [and] in Virginia, also in Loudoun County, the nation is struggling with chronic absenteeism of students, ” Bush said. “This is one of the ways that the PBIS committee thought to rather than focus on the students who aren’t here, to kind of pull some of the focus and incentivize the students who are here and [to] reward them for being here all the time.”

Teachers also hope for positive change for students out of this competition, not only in school but later in life as well. “Attendance is important because it’s a direct reflection of how someone is going to do academically, so if a student is here that correlates with their grade as well,” government teacher Meredith Taylor said. “I also think [attendance] is a sign of responsibility,” Taylor said. “[It] demonstrates responsibility and practices commitment skills, scheduling skills, and organizational skills before leaving the walls of Rock Ridge.”   

To dig into the numbers and understand whether the competition was a success, Bush created a table with statistics of all the classes and compared them to the data from before the competition. The final results showed that almost every class improved their attendance, whether they met the quota or not.

At the end of the competition, 36 classes met the attendance quota. Math teacher Logan Flannigan was one of these classes, satisfied at the incentive showing improved attendance. “I think not being here gets you to the point where you’re behind and then it’s hard for me as a teacher to catch those students up,” Flannigan said. When it comes to finding the motivation to come to school, Flannigan believes there’s more to it than the new incentive. “I think having something other than class to be here for is really important,” Flannigan said. “If your friends are here, you have a good community around you, you want to come to school. Even if you think classes are hard or boring sometimes, it’s good to have something other than class to be here for.”