Skipping a class will cost students

S. Hunterdon High's fee: $100

By CLAIRE HEININGER
STAR-LEDGER STAFF

Forget blaring alarm clocks and nagging parents. Bleary-eyed teenagers in one Hunterdon County high school district this year have a more compelling incentive to roll out of bed on time: their cash.

Rather than doing old-fashioned detention time, South Hunterdon Regional High School students in jeopardy of losing credit toward graduation, or who want to make up the skipped hours without heading to summer school, will compensate by logging hours in front of a computer — at a cost of $100 per course.

"We wanted to really put more of the onus back on the students," Superintendent Lisa Brady said. "The bigger issue for us is we are really trying to be firm about the fact that we believe kids belong in school."

When students at the high school, in West Amwell, have racked up enough unexcused absences to be at risk of losing credit toward graduation — more than four skips for a semester-long course or more than eight for a year — they can no longer rely on sympathetic teachers to squeeze in makeup work. Instead, the teens will have to cough up the money for a tuition-based online service — the first such program of its kind in the state.

"Students are going to make better decisions based on what the consequences will be if they don't attend — it's not just on their parents to pay for them to go to summer school," Principal Don Woodring said. "It's not punitive. It's educational. But there's certainly a responsibility that makes students think twice."

"It seems like a fairly original approach," New Jersey School Boards Association spokesman Frank Belluscio said. "Schools can charge for field trips, activity fees, summer schools . . . (but) the law itself is kind of silent on whether a school board could charge for (a program like South Hunterdon's)."

As long as South Hunterdon follows New Jersey's Core Curriculum Content Standards, "it's completely in the hands of local districts how they want to do online education," said Jon Zlock, spokesman for the state Department of Education. Since the department does not monitor schools' use of paid Internet programs "at that level," Zlock said, he declined to comment on whether South Hunterdon's tuition charge is appropriate.

Since all related fees will be paid directly to Educere — the K-12 online-education provider used for other purposes, including advanced courses in 38 states and approximately 40 New Jersey districts — the school district will not benefit financially, Brady said.

Still, some students judged the fee unnecessarily harsh, and some parents worried it would end up hitting them, not their offspring, in the wallet.

"If I had to pay for it, that wouldn't make me happy because you can do just so much to assist your child getting out the door and to school on time, and as they get older, you just have to start backing off," said Lambertville resident Audrey Frankowski, whose son is an eighth-grader at South Hunterdon and whose daughter graduated last year.

But given the teenage tardiness habit she and other parents have noticed, Frankowski said, the new policy seems well-intentioned.

"The part of it that I appreciate is that it's putting more of the responsibility back on the students, because I do think that in general students today don't respect the guidelines that are necessary in a school setting, and deadlines and things like that," she said. "We're not serving them well by not calling them on it and holding them accountable for it. . . . But I'm kind of torn about (the program), because nobody's got tons of excess money around."

Especially not high schoolers, said seniors Chrissy Hart and Megan Harvey, both 17-year-olds from Lambertville.

"That's a drastic measure to be taking," said Harvey, who agreed with Hart that their South Hunterdon peers don't seem to have serious attendance problems. "I think it's ridiculous. We're not in college yet."

But if it changes students' habits, Brady said, the new policy could help more of them get there — between 70 percent and 80 percent of South Hunterdon graduates go on to college — and beyond. Employers in the community have relayed concerns about teenagers' lack of responsibility and punctuality, said Brady, who described the school's attendance problems as not extreme but still a clear concern, especially during the first class of the day at 7:55 a.m. And asking teachers to bear the burden of assigning and supervising traditional makeup work doesn't help teens grow up, she said.

"I think a lot of people absolutely understand that kids need to be more responsible," Brady said. "Parents might not be thrilled about the fact that there's a cost involved, but certainly I'd be using that as a point of conversation with my child when I'm trying to get them out of bed in the morning."

Students with a legitimate, documented excuse to miss school — such as illness or a family emergency — won't have to use the program. And no one will be forced to pay for the online sessions, because the choice remains to postpone a course until summer school or a future school year, Brady said. Parents will be notified well in advance when their child is at risk of losing credit and needs to pay for Educere, Woodring said, and there is an attendance committee that can hear appeals.

But the dollars and hours can escalate, Woodring said, for a student who misses multiple days for no good reason. With a $100 fee per course, and four courses per day — South Hunterdon is on a block-scheduling format — chronic skippers could potentially pay hundreds. They'd also spend a lot of Saturdays with Educere, as each class period missed would require an hour and a half of the program to make up — a total of 12 hours to recover nine skips in a yearlong course, the principal said.

"It does add up," he said, adding he hoped such costs would deter enough students from missing class that fewer than a dozen out of the school's 370 seventh- through 12th-grade pupils would need the program.

The interactive sessions will be customized to include the exact material missed in each class, a first for Educere in any state, company president Jim Daily said.

"That's very unique," Daily said. "I think most parents and families will receive it well because it keeps the student on track. We're confident that it's going to serve as a model."

_____________________________________________________________________________________________ Claire Heininger works in the Hunterdon County bureau. She may be reached at cheininger@starled ger.com or (908) 782-8326.

URL: <a href="/texis/search/story.html?table=sl2006&id=450ec6084a">Skipping a class will cost students</a>