Absenteeism at School

Jul 20, 2023 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Kaieteur News – There are a great many children each day who are not attending school. When some are asked why they are not at school, they lie by claiming that their parents do not have money to send them to school. The blame is rightly placed on the parents, but for the wrong reasons.

It is not for lack of money that these kids are not in school. They are not attending school because either the parents do not appreciate enough the importance of an education, do not care enough or simply are unconcerned about their parental obligation to send their children to school.

No matter how difficult your circumstances, there is always help available to any parent who wishes to find money to pack a lunch kit for their kids’ school. There are still a great many caring persons in this society who would jump to assist any parent who cannot afford a meal for their kid. But they are not going to do so if they see that parents squandering money on unnecessary things such as phone credits. A child who faces no sanction for not attending school would eventually believe that he or she is not under any lawful duty to go to school and therefore is free to stay at home or to wander on the streets, aimlessly.

There is a unit within the Ministry of Education that is actively going around certain communities, with sections of the media surprisingly in tow, picking up children who are not in school during school hours. This unit has been known to arrest delinquent parents and take them down to the office for a briefing.

But what guarantees are there that these children, after they would have been released, would consistently attend school? There are no guarantees. The parent could send the child to school for a couple of days and then revert to the habitual neglect of this duty.

Then there are some parents and guardians who take their children with them to work and have them sitting there with them all day. There are many self- employed parents who would have their school age children with them all day. This is especially visible around the markets.

There are also cases where parents send their children to school and after school, the children have to sit and wait until the parent is ready to leave for home. This happens a lot around the markets.

Any campaign to deal with this problem, therefore, has to begin around the markets where many school age children are to be found. But once the campaign is over, there is the additional problem of ensuring that the children continue to attend school. This is where the Ministry of Education should intervene. Every class teacher should have a register of all the children in the class. If one day a child does not turn up to school, the teacher should call the parent and find out about the whereabouts of that child.

The child may be sick or may be unable to attend school for some legitimate reason. But the child may have also skulked or is being kept away from school for some other reason.

Most teachers, however, do not bother to immediately enquire about the absence of a child from school; some wait until the next day to demand an excuse while others simply do not bother.

There may be cases where a child leaves for school but finds himself or herself in bad company and therefore does not attend school. The next day that child can produce a forged excuse for his or her absence. This is why it is important that if a child is absent from school for one day, that the teacher makes an inquiry from the parent.

If such a rule is implemented, there is likely to be a storm of protests from teachers who will ask ‘Who will pay for the call.’ Well, if teachers who are miserly to make an issue of something like this, that teacher should really not be teaching in the classroom or in the teaching profession. It is not as if there are twenty or thirty students per class who go missing each day. At most, only two or three go missing.

However, if the cost of the phone calls is a problem, then the teacher should simply prepare a list for the head teacher by 10 am each day as to which children are not in school, and that head teacher should call the parents using the school’s phone (if there is one) or delegate such responsibility to someone else.

If the cost of providing their service is a problem, given the limited Budgets of schools, the parent-teachers associations should be approached to pick up the tab. Checking on children will assist in identifying when a child has left for school but skulks from classes. It will also aid the schools in identifying those parents who are not making an effort to send their children to school. If it is found, however, that there are genuine cases in which parents simply cannot afford to send their children to school because they do not have anything to put in their lunch kit, then this can be addressed by the school’s welfare division after a thorough investigation.

It is therefore important that there be an ongoing campaign to ensure regular attendance by all children. This requires a key role for class teachers, since they are in contact with the children and be best able to indicate whether a child is absent. There are high social costs attributable to school dropouts, and these costs act as a drain on critical resources which can be better deployed to improve educational standards. As such, in order to reduce these costs, it makes sense for a system to be put in place that allows for proactive monitoring of the attendance of children at school.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of this newspaper and its affiliates.)

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• Absenteeism, children, parents, Peeping Tom, School

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