
Kentucky Commissioner of Education Robbie Fletcher
Vibrant learning experiences are the cornerstone of our mission at the Kentucky Department of Education (KDE). When students have vibrant experiences in their classrooms, they have relevant, authentic and joyful opportunities for learning that truly matters to them.
Being in the classroom on a routine, daily basis enables them to experience vibrant learning, meaningful relationships and countless other opportunities that are crucial for their development and success.
Unfortunately, as many schools in the Commonwealth and the nation have seen firsthand, getting students to attend school regularly can be challenging for a variety of reasons. That’s why we here at KDE have been focusing our attention on reducing the number of students who are chronically absent.
Chronic absenteeism is defined as when a student misses 10% of the school year – approximately two days per month – for any reason, and this affects nearly 30% of our students in Kentucky. We need your support to tackle this issue.
There is no one solution to solving chronic absenteeism, as there is no one reason why students are missing school. KDE staff members have been hard at work to raise awareness about the problem and provide resources to help districts and families to encourage children to come to class every day. These resources, available on KDE’s Chronic Absenteeism webpage, including chronic absenteeism data, links to research on the topic and strategies to promote school attendance for various community members.
As you may have already seen – either on billboards or on TV – or heard on the radio, we also rolled out a public messaging campaign this school year, urging students to remember everything they miss out on in school. We have incorporated the “All In” approach by welcoming the voices of students, families and educators to understand the underlying causes of chronic absenteeism and how to address them. Many of these discussions have been eye-opening for me personally and I know that these insights have already proved valuable as we make progress.
We need to work together as a Commonwealth to address the factors contributing to chronic absenteeism. They aren’t easy factors to address, either: we know many students face barriers like chronic health issues, family responsibilities, violence in the community and trouble with transportation, housing or food. We do our best as educators to help our students with these issues during the school day, including our school nutrition services, but many of these are problems that extend beyond the classroom walls and require a community-oriented approach.
One thing we are working on as educators is making students more engaged with the learning process. All of our students deserve vibrant learning experiences to get them motivated and enthusiastic about their lessons, which helps drive attendance.
In my short tenure as commissioner, I have seen many districts incorporate vibrant learning experiences into their lesson plans.
Many options for vibrant learning experiences fall under Kentucky’s career and technical education (CTE) offerings, which we celebrate every February during Career and Technical Education Month. CTE pathways pave the way for early post-secondary opportunities for students in the form of recognized industry certifications and credentials in a variety of fields that are engaging and lead to careers that are necessary for the health of their communities. Students can become actively engaged in things like welding, dentistry, nursing, culinary arts, engineering and media production, just to name a few. Students in these fields all have a higher likelihood of success in school because they’re having vibrant learning experiences on a regular basis.
These are just a few examples of vibrant learning experiences students can have in the classroom to keep them more engaged.
When students miss school, they miss out on learning, meaningful relationships and countless other opportunities that are crucial for their development and future success. We need the involvement of everyone to make sure more of Kentucky’s children can experience the wonderful things happening in our classrooms that will ultimately help them become more productive citizens.
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