Board hears attendance and discipline data showing steady attendance and continued disproportionality in disciplinary removals

District staff presented the quarterly student attendance report on June 25, citing an overall attendance rate reported as roughly 92.6% and noting the district sits at the state average for attendance.

"Student attendance represents 15% of the engagement and communication core area of our KPI," said Mister Kemmer, who presented the report. He said the district recorded 2,321 days of disciplinary removals this year and that those removals account for about 2% of total student absences after a recalculation.

Why it matters: the report highlighted that, while overall disciplinary removals have declined slightly year over year, disproportionality persists. "The percentage of days they're removed for disciplinary reasons has remained somewhat steady [for] students who are Black or two or more races while it's decreased for students who are white," Kemmer said. Board members asked for future reports to show removals broken out by demographic group and asked staff to provide counts of distinct students affected (for example, whether the removal days represent a small number of students with many incidents or many students with a few incidents).

Staff also outlined operational changes to support attendance tracking and equity work: the district will move to a new student information/analytics platform (NextPath) next year to enable different disaggregation and more timely monitoring; planned changes to Infinite Campus attendance codes will add a medical-excuse code; and elementary tardy thresholds will change from 10 minutes to 30 minutes so late arrivals that still result in substantive instructional time are not marked as full-day unexcused absences.

Board members discussed consistency across buildings, training for principals and deans on how behaviors are coded, and efforts to remove subjectivity from discipline decisions. "The more subjectivity you have, the more opportunity for bias comes into play," a district leader said. Staff noted that targeted work with principals, revised behavior definitions in handbooks and standardizing disciplinary responses are part of ongoing efforts to reduce disproportionality.

Next steps: staff will provide more detailed suspension and removal data in the July SEL report and will work with principals and deans to standardize coding and discipline procedures; the district expects to use NextPath to monitor short-term trends and disaggregated results more rapidly.