CC#15: Mr. Kurt Seiler - Independence High School

Mr. Kurt Seiler of Independence High School, USD 446, talks about their success tackling the issue of chronic absenteeism. Incentives for attending school as it is tied to their "good standing" policy has produced the results they hoped. Kurt shared some of the details and adjustments they made along the way to finetune their approach to solving one of the most talked about issues facing education right now.

Contact Kurt Seiler: [e-mail]

Chapters (time stamps do not account for 30 second intro) 00:00  Introduction to Chronic Absenteeism 01:59  Independence High School's Strategies 06:02  Good Standing Policy Explained 11:53  J's for Days Initiative 18:09  Community Involvement and Support 21:45  Celebrating Independence High School

(full transcript of show below)

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TRANSCRIPT (AI produced)

Rick Sola (00:01.866) Good morning and welcome to another edition of Cool Coffee with Kansas principals specifically today with Mr. Kurt Seiler of Independence High School, USD 446, home of the Bulldogs. Good morning, Kurt.

Kurt Seiler (00:15.425) Morning, Rick.

Rick Sola (00:17.23) And it is bright and early, just about a 645 start time here on a Friday, October 4th. Kurt, I've got my morning coffee. What is your morning drink? Okay. Whatever it is, we all have it and we got to have it.

Kurt Seiler (00:28.974) I've got a Dr. Pepper.

That's right.

Rick Sola (00:37.046) Before we get started on really an important topic, excited to talk about it, but important topic today of chronic absenteeism facing education, I do want to draw attention to the show notes for this and every show. There you're going to find a full transcript of today's show here with Mr. Seiler and also contact information for him and also a Google form to leave feedback or provide input or even express interest to be on this show. So please.

check that out in every one of our show notes. So, all right, Kurt, we had talked to each other a little bit through email before, and you had shared some interesting things, some positive things going on in Independence High School where you're at regarding chronic absenteeism, which is something not even just statewide, but nationwide where we're spending a lot of time.

working with and just for that definition of chronic absenteeism, any student who misses 10 % or more of the school year for any reason, including excused, unexcused suspensions and kind of a typical example is 180 days of instruction, student misses 18 or more, that's about two a month. So it adds up really quick, but share a little bit about Independence High School and

what has led to some of the things that we're about to talk about.

Kurt Seiler (02:03.82) Yeah, so just like I'm sure most of schools across the nation after COVID hit, the absenteeism numbers just shot up and you know, I attribute it to kids were at at home for an entire quarter and ours, you know, some schools it was a lot longer than that, but an entire nine weeks learning from home, it's hard to pull them back to get them to come to school on a regular basis. And so our chronic absenteeism numbers are tardies are

really just our ADA, our average daily attendance, was extremely low from what we were wanting. So we sat down, you know, as an admin team and as a building leadership team to really try and target on how we were going to improve those numbers. And we came up with two really good policies in my mind. One is our good standing policy and another is what we call Jays for days. So I'll talk about the good standing policy first.

Rick Sola (02:49.118) And we can not work too.

Thank

Kurt Seiler (03:03.256) So our good staining policy is you cannot have more than two in school suspensions in a semester. You cannot have an out of school suspension. You cannot have more than six tardies to all your classes cumulatively for a nine weeks. You cannot be ineligible academically. So not pass five new classes the previous semester.

Rick Sola (03:26.431) you

Kurt Seiler (03: