Due to excessive absences lead to being a behavior due to impeding a students learning we have to write goal and benchmarks. Students has been absent 26 days and tardy 17 times.
I'm not sure how you can meet a goal based on attendance. You cant make the student show up. You can however write a goal on him/her having a check in when they do come.
The problem with attendance issues — especially in the younger grade levels — is that it’s often coming from other problems, and most of the time it’s not their fault. Especially if they relay on their parent to get to and from school. If that’s the case, it’s usually not their fault they’re absent or running late. At this point, I’d say get your admin team involved and see what the bigger issue is.
Unless you know the reason for the absences and tardiness, you can't really write a goal that can have any service attached to it. At that point it is a goal for looks only. A child who is absent or tardy due to anxiety needs a much different goal than a student who is young and the parent needs to bring them to school and the parent is struggling for any reason (not all are intentional). A goal about showing up is really useless. The measure might be decreased absenteeism or tardiness, but the goal should be related to the reason, if it actually something that can be addressed.
I agree. The first thing is to find out the reason why the child is often late or tardy (e.g. no transportation?anxiety? parent's lack of concerns about school?). At an elementary level, when a child is often absent, an IEP meeting would be convened. During the meeting, the counselor would discuss the importance of attending school with the parents. I'm not sure what happens at a middle school level.
