Psusd.us Website Review

As we prepare for a well-deserved three-week winter break, I need to share some very concerning – and quite startling – information with you. From the beginning of the 2018-19 school year through December 4, Palm Springs Unified School District students have missed 90,012 full days of instruction. No, that isn’t a typo; you read it correctly! What we know unequivocally is that 83 percent of students who are chronically absent in kindergarten and first grade cannot read at grade level when they reach third grade. These students are four times more likely to drop out of school before they graduate, and drop outs are eight times more likely to be incarcerated than their peers with high school diplomas. Of the over 90,000 of school days missed by our students, 21,479 are our early learners in grades kindergarten through third. The issue is critical and we, as educators and family members, The recently released California Dashboard shows our District had 17 percent of our District students were chronically absent last year, which means that these students missed more than 10 percent of the school year. It is the second worst rate of chronical absenteeism in Riverside County. I know you will agree that his is unacceptable, and our children are the ones who will suffer for we don’t change the To help us address this situation, we have launched a new program to address the attendance issue. It is called “Attention to Attendance” (A2A), and the focus is on education and communication with our families around individual student attendance issues and the impacts and consequences of chronic absenteeism. Beginning the week of December 18, about 10,200 of our District parents and guardians will be receiving a letter from their school principal that shares with them information about exactly how much school their child has missed since the beginning of the school year as well as of the effects of missing so much instructional time.   Parents of all of our early learners will also be receiving an educational piece that talks about the importance of daily attendance