Student Absences:
There are a lot of costs in running a school. Saving on unnecessary costs lets us put more money into looking after our children and supporting their learning.
One big cost for us is the time we spend each day chasing up on unexplained student absences.
Today is a good example. We had 165 children away today - and we received notification for only 57 of those children. This means my office staff have to try to track down 108 families today to try to find out whether their child should be at school, or is sick, or is away for some other reason. The Ministry of Education requires us to put a reason for absence for every child who is absent from school. At today's rate that would be 20,520 absences a year that we would have to manually, individually chase up.
That adds up to a lot of time and money that could be going towards our children instead of being wasted.
We have so many ways you can let us know -
- email away@westernheights.school.nz
- phone 09 8361213 and press 1 and leave a message
- text our school cell phone 0210402125
- our Hero App - available from App Store and Google Play
The Hero App - search the App Store or Google Play by typing in Linc-Ed - is the BEST way to let us know about absences.
It is so easy to get the right message to the right place and really easy to type in the "reason" for absence.
Using Hero sends the absence message directly to our office and to your child's teacher and records it in the right place for Ministry requirements - saving office staff having to manually enter it there.
Please do provide a reason for your child's absence when you connect via one of the above methods. We really need more information than just "not in today" or similar.
On that point, please let us know if the absence is likely
to be for more than one day. Ideally let us know each day that your child is away, not just on the first day. I know that is extra work for you but it saves us so much time and it does a lot to help us to ensure EVERY child is safely accounted for EVERY day.
With sincere thanks.
