With the new school year just around the corner, Merritt Secondary School is taking steps to ensure once its students start attending classes again, they continue to do so throughout the year.

Principal Bill Lawrence told the Herald attendance is an area of concern this year because in-house stats show a correlation between missed days and failing grades.

Over the past three years, 36 per cent of MSS students have missed 16 or more days of school per year. The students in that 36 per cent account for 70 per cent of courses that have failing grades in them.

“Overall, we just have a lot not attending,” Lawrence said.

Lawrence said to deal with the attendance issue, MSS plans to implement some action items such as surveying students on why they attend regulary or why they miss classes.

“We’re going to actively look at, as a staff, strategies that promote student engagement. Really, what you’re talking about is students disengaging from school and that’s an attendance issue,” Lawrence said. “And there are all kinds of reasons for that. Sometimes there are things going on at home they need to be home for, sometimes there’s drug issues, sometimes there’s mental health issues. There are all kinds of different reasons why kids don’t attend, and so we’re going to do a real strong examination of those [reasons] and do something about the factors we can do something about,” Lawrence said.

Lawrence said because MSS students live in a rural community, it’s understandable students might have to miss some school days to access services for which they need to leave town.

MSS is also consulting Stepping up the Pace: Improving Attendance, a How-to Mini-Guide and the University of Alberta publication Student Engagement: What do we know and what should we do? to help guide the actions they take regarding attendance this year.

Stepping up the Pace says Grade 9 students who miss five of the first 30 days of school are at serious risk of not graduating, Lawrence told the Herald.

“We’re going to earmark those kids strongly for intervention, whatever that intervention looks like,” Lawrence said.

The school has a draft of other action items regarding attendance they to implement depending on the amount of commitment MSS staff can provide, Lawrence said.

In-house statistics show courses at all five grade levels at MSS had multiple students receiving failing grades.

Last year, there were 48 Grade 12 courses failed by 23 students.

In Grade 11, there were 111 failed courses by 56 students, as well as 91 failed Grade 10 courses between 51 students.

Forty students failed 82 Grade 9 students, while 12 students in Grade 8 failed 33 courses.

Lawrence said there is a correlation between the percentage of failed courses and students who miss 20 or more days of school.

In 2011, 75 per cent of failed Grade 12 classes were by students who missed 20 days or more ? which was the highest percentage of any grade.

In 2012, the highest percentage was from Grade 11 courses which had 76 per cent of failed courses come from students missing 20 or more days of school.

Last year, it was the Grade 10s who topped the list at 77 per cent of failed courses coming from students who missed at least 20 days.

Those percentages didn’t drop below 52 per cent for any grade between 2011 and 2013.

“Last year, Grade 10 was our worst year around failed courses. It changes, it depends on cohorts, it depends on all that kind of stuff,” Lawrence said.

The stats show the highest percentage of First Nations students who missed more than 16 days was in Grade 12 at 63 per cent in 2011 and 63 per cent for Grade 11 in 2012.

Last year, the highest percentage of courses failed by aboriginal students who missed 16 or more days was 55 per cent, from Grade 10.

Those percentages hovered slightly above and below the 50 per cent mark for aboriginal students at each grade level over the past three years.

The goal this year is to reduce the percentage of students who miss 16 or more days of school from 36 to 30 per cent, Lawrence said.

MSS also wants to reduce the number of failing grades at each grade level.