Thursday, April 23, 2015

Day 4 of the 21 Day Daily Data Challenge

Welcome to Day 4 of the Daily Data Challenge.  Today's challenge was gathering attendance data.  So how did you do?

I ran the report for students with 15 or more unexcused absences year to date.  There were only a couple of surprises and I felt pretty good about that.  My School Social Worker and I have been working to keep tabs on these students and meet with their parents.  I also found a couple of reports I didn't know existed.  One is an attendance break down by number of students absent at 0-10 days, 11-20 days, and 21+ days.  Just by skimming it I learned my  biggest attendance problem is in first grade.

Another report I found was number students absent at 0-10 days, 11-20 days and 21+days broken down by race, gender, ESE, and ELL.  With just a cursory look, I could see my African-American students had the best overall attendance and my Hispanic students needed the most improvement.  I never knew about these reports and was excited to find them.  It's easy to see how they will be an important part of my data review.  As I am typing this I realize I got so excited about the 2 new reports I didn't run the reports for tardy students and those with 15 or more excused absences. Oh well, there's always tomorrow!

And speaking of tomorrow, our data challenge for Day 5 is discipline data.  My district provides a great report with some awesome breakdowns including gender, ethnicity, ESE, location and type of offense, day of the week, and time of day.  Be sure to get all the data you can, not just for the most recent grading period, but for the whole year.  You want to be able to look at trends.  And if your district is like mine, all of this year's data gets purged during the summer so gather all you can now!

If you are interested in joining the 21 Day Daily Data Challenge check out all the details HERE.  It's not to late to jump right in and join us.  Also, please stop by the Exploring School Counseling Facebook page and share how your challenge is going.

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