Attendance or authority: Is perfect attendance worth it?

Northview's new take on attendance policy and effective education

Design by Milo Park.

Arshita Sunnam, Copy Editor, Vinaya Abraham, Staff Writer, & Milo Park

At 6 a.m. on the dot, your alarm starts blaring. It is shrill and relentless. You have no choice but to get up. The pounding headache you've had since last night is only getting worse. You consider staying home, but you've already used two absences, and it's only September. So you go to school. You take the quiz you've been studying hard for since yesterday. And...you fail. Maybe if you had taken the day to rest, you wouldn't have failed. Maybe you should've just opted to stay home and take the final graded experience after all.

At the start of the 2026-27 school year, Northview High School implemented a new attendance policy: Any student who misses more than three days of a class period, not counting virtual days and pre-approved absences for school events, must take a final graded experience at the end of each semester. In previous years, final assessments could replace a student's lowest quiz grade. The final graded experience, however, is an additional minor grade, meaning there are no retakes. Students who keep an 85+ average and stay within the absence limit can skip it entirely. The finals themselves fall in the last three days of the semester.

Three absences don't sound like a lot, but behind that number is a bigger question: Is Northview trying to help students learn, or just trying to get them in the building?

Education has come a long way since public schools opened their doors to everyone. Society went from one-room schoolhouses to online classes via Zoom during a global pandemic. We have since recovered from the troubles of a worldwide shutdown, but schools are still dealing with its lingering effects. Attendance, in particular, has plummeted since the pandemic, with sources reporting that absence rates jumped from 16% before the 2020-21 school year to 30% after.

As attendance drops, so have students' comprehension, literacy, and cognition. Additionally, asynchronous learning gets easier when students can access all their in-class material online, and the only thing they're missing is the teacher. Amanda Choi, a math teacher at Northview, has watched this shift occur in her own classroom.

"Now we post all of the missing materials on Canvas. So now when kids are absent, they can find a key online," Choi said. "Before, when kids were absent, you just handed them a blank sheet of notes and [told them to] figure it out."

This convenience comes with a cost. Because missed material is so readily available, students and families don't see as much importance in going to school and being present for actual instruction. However, it wasn't always this way.

"There was a lot more understanding community-wise as to [the idea that] kids are supposed to be at school," she said.

Families rarely pulled kids out for weeks at a time, she explained, and that expectation went mostly unchallenged until the pandemic hit. The rules back then didn't have to be strict because people followed them. Now that they aren't, many teachers see the tougher policies as a response.

"It's us trying to come up with a solution to get kids to be here," Choi said. "It's the administration and leadership's response to attempt to fix the problem."

Schools, responsible for the quality of their students' education, now feel forced to take stricter measures to make sure kids are actually learning. The COVID-19 pandemic had a significant impact on K-12 education, leaving gaps in both learning and students' study habits.

"All of these policies have come into play because we're trying to come up with ways to help improve student ability and close those missing gaps," Choi said. "When people aren't coming consistently...we can't help teach the stuff that you're missing."

For Choi, being in the room matters for a simple reason: When she explains something and looks out at her class, she can see who is confused, then stop and reteach it a different way.

"If I can clarify something early on in the lesson, you're going to be able to track along better as we go," she said.

Money may be part of the picture as well. Attendance may be related to funding, at least partially. Though unconfirmed, it suggests an additional potential motive for encouraging attendance. However, the disconnect goes beyond just attendance. Speaking about how the school approaches AI, Choi described how students currently focus on different priorities than teachers want them to think about, a pattern that resembles this new attendance policy.

"Knowing where we want you to end up mentally as an adult, we're trying to make sure you are creative. We're trying to cultivate this viewpoint that we want you to have and want you to grow those skills," Choi said. "But on the student side, this is for a grade and you're trying to get it done...our end goals are different."

Elizabeth Lake, an English language arts teacher of 21 years at Northview, has also watched the change in attendance from the front of the classroom over the years. 

"Students used to come to school a lot more than they do now," Lake said. 

While she doesn't only want to blame COVID-19, Lake believes that the timing matters, as many students spent more than a year online at an age where habits form. To her, that explains the change in attitude, at least partially. 

"If parents are not encouraging their own children to come to school ... it's going to be difficult for the school to get the kids to come," Lake said.

As a result of these attendance shortages, Northview has implemented stricter policies such as the final graded experience. 

"I think having the final graded experience, even if that's not the intention, will probably result in better attendance at the end of the semester," Lake said. 

Many students mistakenly believe that Northview allows only three absences, excused or unexcused, each semester. Martin Neuhaus, Northview's principal, aims to clear any misunderstandings, reiterating the fact that students can have eight total absences, including five excused virtual (remote) days.

“It's almost one absence every two weeks,” Neuhaus said.

That works out to eight days across a 16- to 17-week semester. In Neuhaus' view, the final graded experience isn't meant to punish anyone; it should work like a small-scale college final, a cumulative test of what you've learned.

"I would love that if everyone exempted it," Neuhaus said.

This would mean every student is showing up and doing well enough not to need the extra test. He said that is also why it is a minor grade. Students would have to take a major grade if they missed it, which he said would be a hardship on teachers, especially in the spring. Still, an incentive with a condition is one that has a ceiling. A common worry among students is that eight absences leave little room for actually being sick, which could push people to drag themselves to school. Neuhaus states that this is the opposite of the intent.

"We don't want anybody to come to school when they're sick. That's not what this is about," Neuhaus said. "The message needs to be that if you're sick, stay home."

Lake finds the whole dynamic backwards. The five remote days started as a county initiative so students with COVID could stay home until they were no longer contagious. By her description, the rules attached to them haven't changed: you aren't supposed to take one on a day with an assessment, you should notify your teacher beforehand, and you still need to do the work from home. This means that students who have a headache and a quiz in the same morning wouldn't have that option.

"The default back then was to go to school unless you were sick, and if you were sick, stay home," Lake said. "And now it seems that for some students, the default is [not wanting] to go to school. And that seems so backwards to me."

Capping absences is part of a larger pattern where schools seem to get stricter every year. Beyond the attendance policy, the statewide personal device ban and the usage of tools like Smartpass at Northview raise the question of why schools feel the need to double down on strictness in the classroom. One likely answer is that schools see a link between discipline and academic performance, and they feel pressured to start implementing stricter policies. However, Neuhaus doesn't see it this way.

"I actually don't feel like we're being stricter," Neuhaus said. "We're actually providing an incentive because we have an attendance issue at Northview."

Attendance has been a concern at Northview for some time now. During the 2025-26 school year, senior attendance percentage hit a severe low.

“Last year, we had almost 75% of our seniors actually showing up each day, which means 25% of the kids were not,” he said. “When you’re not here, you’re certainly not learning.”

The numbers this fall look much better. In August and September, Neuhaus said, attendance sat at 97.7% for freshmen, 97.3% for sophomores, 96.2% for juniors, and 95.6% for seniors. But those are not the months he worries about.

"The trouble we have with juniors and seniors is not August and September. It's March, April, and May," Neuhaus said.

When asked whether the policies are about rankings, Neuhaus said that isn't the goal. He said that Northview is currently the number one comprehensive high school in Ga. Being comprehensive, to him, means more than just academics, but rather includes athletics, arts, and everything students do in the building.

"I don't know how you can do any of that without showing up," Neuhaus said.

Neuhaus believes that in order to perform well, it is vital that students are present as often as possible. Others argue that proper attendance greatly contributes to a child's development as well. Lake explains that students who generally show up more have a better sense of duty, whereas those who treat attendance as optional have a harder time with that skill later in life.

"I think showing up should be the start, because my worry is for students whose default is that they don't really feel like coming to school, that they could become employees who don't really feel like going to work," Lake said.

Northview's approach isn't unique, and neither is the problem it is facing. Statewide, Georgia's chronic absenteeism rate, which counts students who miss at least 10% of the year for any reason, fell to 17.7% in 2025-26, according to Capitol Beat. That is nearly 2% lower than the year before and down from nearly a quarter of students in 2022. It is still more than 5% above pre-pandemic levels. These statistics show how seriously the state is taking the issue. Lawmakers passed a law last year requiring districts with high absenteeism to form attendance review teams. Furthermore, a follow-up bill this year would have barred chronically absent students from extracurriculars and suspended their driver’s licenses as a last resort, after they violated a signed attendance plan. It passed the Senate but faced heavy opposition in the House, where critics saw some provisions as too harsh.

Closer to home, other Georgia districts have also created policies that tie final exam exemptions to attendance. High school students in Bartow County must have a class average of at least 70% and no more than three unexcused absences in that class to skip a final. Bartow Superintendent Clint Terza said that the district's chronic absenteeism is about 15.7%, down from nearly 26% the previous year, and he wants it under 10%. In Fayette County, students can exempt one final per semester if they have seven or fewer attendance occurrences, including full-day absences, late arrivals, and early checkouts, as well as a grade of 70 or above in the class.

Again, Northview's grade requirement is higher: an 85 average, compared with 70 in both Bartow and Fayette. On absences, the policies are more similar. Northview allows eight days when counting virtual days, compared with Fayette County's seven attendance occurrences and Bartow's three unexcused absences. For comparison, state law treats a student as truant (chronically absent without permission) after more than five unexcused absences. Additionally, the consequences are different, with a final exam instead of a legal label. But the facts give a sense of where Northview falls in this new wave of attendance policies. It's too early to know if these new changes will work. Neuhaus expects the real pushback to start around December, when students who missed nine days start asking whether they can still be exempt from the final graded experience. His answer, he said, will still be no. His hope for the lowest attendance group, the seniors, is to stay above 85% attendance.

"If we can stay above 85%, I would be ecstatic. [But it can be] a lofty goal," Neuhaus said.

For students who have spent the last few weeks counting their own absences, "incentive" can sound a lot like "limit." The question that remains is whether students will feel rewarded for their attendance or boxed in by the requirements. Neuhaus has asked for one thing in the meantime: help in clearing up the misconception.

"It's not meant to be a penalty in any way, shape, or form," Neuhaus said.

Whether students eventually perceive the policy as a reward or a restriction will become clearer in the following months. Until then, the 6 a.m. alarm will keep going off, and students will keep weighing whether it’s worth getting up for.