Attendance is on the rise at Jefferson City Public Schools with percentages in the mid-90s.
Compared to last year, the district increased its attendance to 94.19 percent in January - up from last year at 93.95, Superintendent Larry Linthacum said at the February board meeting.
Lawson and Moreau elementary schools have the highest attendance at about 96 percent for January. East Elementary had the biggest improvement from last year at 93.94 - up 1.25 percent from the same time last year.
The Jefferson City Academic Center had the lowest attendance rate for January at 79.15.
The district has been campaigning to improve its attendance this year to get students excited about going to school. If attendance goes up, student learning will go up, Linthacum said.
"We want to have positive learning environments so that kids want to come to school," he said. "We want to make sure the lessons are relevant and that kids are engaged."
A few benefits come from high attendance marks, including more district funding and a higher score on Missouri's Annual Performance Report, which is scored on five categories out of 140 points possible.
Attendance is one of the categories and is worth 10 points.
District officials have expressed their discontent with the results of the 2015 APR, which awarded the district an overall 70.7 percent.
In order to mitigate any cracks in student learning throughout the year, the district is creating an APR predictor. Dawn Berhorst, assistant to the superintendent, said district administrators have been working on this since December and are closer to having some raw data for the board.
Administrators are pulling data from all five of the APR categories: academic achievement, subgroup achievement, college and career readiness, attendance, and graduation rates.
Berhorst said they've found the district is lacking in some benchmark measures for academic achievement and subgroup achievement.
Right now, the district can use End of Course exams and the SRI (Scholastic Reading Inventory) as benchmarks for how well the district will do in academic and subgroup achievement.
Administrators are looking at creating some districtwide assessments for use throughout the year. They should be complete this summer.
For college and career readiness, staff are comparing state standards for the ACT, SAT, Advanced Placement Test, the ASVAB and the COMPASS test. Most seniors have already taken the ACT, so it's an easy measure to assess.
Attendance is also a simple assessment because data can be pulled quarterly.
Graduation rates are the hardest to address because the data isn't acquired until post-graduation. Berhorst said staff have been analyzing drop-out rates throughout the year and measuring students progressing toward graduation as indicators for the predictor model.
Missouri students are a couple months away from taking the Missouri Assessment Program - the state's standardized test - so the predictor won't be helpful this academic year.
The model should be complete in the fall in time to assess the 2016-17 school year students.
Berhorst said Linthacum will have to decide if the APR predictor reports will be available for public consumption or if they'll be an attachment in board members' packets.
The board ended the meeting by entering into closed session to discuss personnel records. The board voted unanimously, except for member Michael Couty, who was absent from the meeting.