DESE Attendance Guidelines

The Missouri Department of Elementary & Secondary Education (DESE) has created a new way of measuring attendance.  The new method, called proportional attendance, calculates each individual student's attendance.  The target for each student is 90% attendance.  Each school district is required to have 90% of their student population make this attendance mark.  This proportional attendance calculation is commonly referred to as the 90/90 rule. Previously, attendance was measured using a school's average daily attendance(ADA), which measured the population as a whole.  CHS has annually performed well on it's ADA.  For example, in the 2014-15 school year, CHS had an ADA of 95.2% which was 1.4% above the state average.  Using the new proportional attendance measurement, only 87.7% met the attendance mark.  With this measurement, students with a very high attendance rate do not help the attendance calculation as much as students with a low rate hurt the mark.  For example, if you have 3 students who have 100% attendance and one student who has an 89% attendance rate a school's ADA would be 97.25%, but its proportional attendance rate would be 75%  Both ADA and the Proportional Attendance rates are calculated on an hourly rate.