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    Dinosaurs and Nachos, Very Legal and Very Cool!Anne Branigin
    11/30/17 9:39pm

    *sigh*

    The thought of a high school senior missing class to pay for rent is not an indictment of any school. Or it shouldn’t be.

    It’s an indictment of our whole fucking society. We need to do better. Goddammit us.

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    Not Enough Day DrinkingAnne Branigin
    11/30/17 4:23pm

    DCPS official policy requires that students fail a course if they miss a class 30 times.

    30 fucking times? WTF? Assuming they have the class every day, that’s 6 weeks of absence. Not including vacation days.

    That’s literally an entire college semester (50 minute class x 3 days a week x 12 weeks = 30 hrs of class)

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      Manny Both-Hanz diedNot Enough Day Drinking
      11/30/17 11:14pm

      In a lot of situations, like extended illness or other emergency, it makes sense to allow highschoolers to pass even when they miss a lot of class. If you can keep up with the classwork from home, why shouldn’t you get to move on to the next class? It’s not an ideal situation for anyone, but they try to give students a lot of latitude before they expel them or hold them back.

      I assume the 30 days is some sort of cap, and includes excused absences like those contemplated here.

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      Not Enough Day DrinkingManny Both-Hanz died
      11/30/17 11:30pm

      Why have school at all? Just give kids a test at the end of the year and see if they can pass?

      If a kid can miss 6 weeks of school and not fall behind, then the school is failing to push their kids to be their best which is an indictment of the school. If the administrators don’t care that kids aren’t showing up, and the kids don’t care enough to show, then who’s benefiting? I guess the faculty get a paycheck either way, but the kids aren’t benefiting and neither is society. They’re just going through the motions

      The documents showed that half of the graduates missed more than three months of school last year, unexcused. One in five students was absent more than present — missing more than 90 days of school.

      They’re in for a rude awakening if they actually try to go college. What’s going to happen is they’re going to take out thousands in student loans, go for 1 or 2 semesters before realizing they’re never going to pass and drop out, none the richer, but a lot more in debt. The school basically fucked these kids. They just don’t know it yet.

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    crouching tigerAnne Branigin
    11/30/17 9:58pm

    My high school pulled this stunt. Had everyone apply to community college, etc, to juice their scores. Not sure how many of us went to college, but maybe half, which isn’t all that bad for NC.

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      crouching tigercrouching tiger
      12/01/17 1:40pm

      oh, fuck off

      Illustration for article titled
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    MimiRosieAnne Branigin
    11/30/17 4:58pm

    If the high school’s administrators “souped up” those records in order to look good, then they’re not hurting anyone except for the students. Especially if those students have made plans to attend college. If a child is not educationally prepared to even take the basic college courses, then its a shame.

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    GinAndTonic, Potential GrizzlyAnne Branigin
    11/30/17 7:29pm

    I heard this story on the radio the other day, and man. I live in California, and here, school funding is tied to student attendance, rather than student enrollment, which creates a huge incentive for schools to make sure there are asses in seats every single day. It’s really hard to pull kids out of school here for vacations, for example, because those are considered unexcused absences. Sounds like DC needs to switch to that.

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    AfroluvAnne Branigin
    12/01/17 3:15pm

    Maybe it’s been a long day, but I am confused. The thing to be celebrated is that these kids got accepted into college, that means that several college admissions offices somewhere looked at the whole package of a student’s four years of high school, standardized test scores and extracurricular activies and sent out an offer letter.
    The question discussed is how did these kids pass their senior year without better attendance— who knows? Maybe despite their attendance they turned in assignments and passed the tests. WThey got accepted to college already, get over it.

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    AfroluvAnne Branigin
    12/01/17 3:16pm

    Maybe it’s been a long day, but I am confused. The thing to be celebrated is that these kids got accepted into college, that means that several college admissions offices somewhere looked at the whole package of a student’s four years of high school, standardized test scores and extracurricular activities and sent out an offer letter.
    The question discussed is how did these kids pass their senior year without better attendance— who knows? Maybe despite their attendance they turned in assignments and passed the tests. They got accepted to college already, let’s get over it.

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    Ugh.Anne Branigin
    11/30/17 4:47pm

    Yeah, this sounded...weird.

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    BrynandNessaAnne Branigin
    11/30/17 9:33pm

    I’m not going to say this isn’t sad as hell because it’s not helping the students when they get to the next level.

    I am going to say that it pisses me off that news teams that spend their time not reporting on shit they should cover go digging to find stuff like this on students of color the moment the good news breaks.

    I grew up in Los Angeles and this is exactly what they did to the Garfield High School students in the ‘80s after they killed their AP Calculus exams. Let’s not front like the students at Philips Exeter and Harvard Westlake are always where they need to be... or sober when they do arrive.

    Rant over.

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