This is the link to the article in 4/22/2010 Roanoke Times: Franklin County School’s Policy Critic Expunged From Teaching List.

Parents of students that have been or may be negatively affected by the policy need to speak up now. As you can see, you will have no chance if you have to deal with them alone in regards to the attendance policy.

Dr. Lackey says people are removed from the substitute list for “dealing with personal agenda items rather than substituting.”  This does not apply in this situation. Nothing was done “rather than substituting”. Talking about subjects of interest during your break or before and after school is permitted.  In fact, I was asked by a School Board member, ultimately my boss and Dr. Lackey’s, to get as much input as possible from parents about the attendance policy. If I was doing anything wrong, a simple call would have been sufficient. Even though asked many times, I have not received a single response indicating anything that I have distributed that was “false or inappropriate”.

“It’s not fair to any child to change it midyear,” Mrs. Cundiff said.

How would it not be fair to give a child the grade earned? The syllabus in each class is supposed to be a contract with the students and state how grades will be determined.  Participation/ attendance normally is not permitted to be greater than 10%. Arbitrarily giving F’s for a few days missed will probably be found to be illegal. What will come next? “We don’t like what you are wearing, so we are going to give you an F.”

The change does not have to happen by year-end, but the records of the 82 (not just the 44) students that received F’s during the first semester, and all those that receive F’s in the second semester solely for attendance, need to be reviewed to determine if it will affect his/her college applications, scholarships or acceptance into a higher level class. You can go to www.schoolpoliciesthathurt.com to see the explanation from Pennington as to the numbers affected by the policy. There are court cases (some of which I have provided to them) that indicate School systems have had to pay for the negative affect on the student of having grades lowered unfairly.

Research is being done to see if it is legal to charge for Saturday School. We have not been able to find any other district that does so.  In addition, other districts that have Saturday School provide instruction and/ or counseling instead of just “babysitting” which is what it is at FCHS.

“We know that if you don’t have a policy, kids won’t come to school,” Dr. Lackey said. WOW, that says it all, Dr. Lackey does not feel that kids would come to FCHS without threat of punishment? I know differently, most kids want the wonderful education available there.

The school system receives about $10,000 per student from all the resources combined. If he feels “kids won’t come”, then he needs to do his job, survey kids (for which I have been reprimanded) and find out what would work. He and the School Board could also have taken advantage of the ideas from the dozens of ways that other schools improve attendance of which I have provided them.

However, SINCE MY EMAIL ADDRESS WAS BLOCKED from School Board Members, teachers and administrators, they did not receive much of the research of the last 6 months until I recently gave them a 35 page packet of condensed emails which I had attempted to get to them. They blocked my email without notifying me and therefore I was not getting through to the 30+ teachers of my children regarding health and safety concerns.

It is time for people to speak out.