Unexcused absences during first quarter will not count toward the Loss of Credit penalty, MCPS announced Oct. 31.

All county high schools experienced problems with the new attendance software, which failed to send automatic emails and phone calls to students with absences. As a result, schools didn’t conduct the interventions required under the new Loss of Credit penalty.

Administrators knew at the beginning of the school year that the software wasn’t ready. They asked teachers to alert them if a student had three or more unexcused absences in one class. Counselors then began meeting with those students, but there wasn’t enough time for all the interventions, principal Alan Goodwin said. The problem was worse at high schools with more absences, he said.

Schools received lists of students with three or more unexcused absences on Oct. 17, which was too late in the quarter to allow guidance counselors to meet with students, Goodwin said.

“When you get those lists of students, what you’re supposed to do is hold a meaningful intervention with them to help them get back on track,” Goodwin said. “There’s no way that schools would have had enough time to do that by the end of the first quarter.”

Unexcused absences will count towards the Loss of Credit penalty beginning Nov. 1, the first day of the second quarter.

County high school principals asked the Board of Education at the beginning of the summer to implement the Loss of Credit penalty because of the high number of absences last year.

“We asked for certain elements of the attendance program — period-by-period attendance, automatic emails to parents, counselors and administrators when a kid has three or more absences,” Goodwin said. “The school system started trying to develop the software that would do that. Meanwhile, there’s been problems with the Pinnacle and Edline all year, so there’s just a lot that they had to do.”

Goodwin believes that the county’s decision to waive the Loss of Credit penalty for the first quarter is fair because the attendance software wasn’t working for most of the marking period.

“Those unexcused absences don’t disappear,” he said. “If you really skipped a class and got a zero, that zero still stands. So there’s a reprieve in that those don’t count towards loss of credit, but they’re still on your record. Basically, first quarter, whatever a student gets is going to be based on performance — their grade — not a combination of performance and attendance.”

Goodwin said he is glad that the attendance software is now working so that the school can implement the Loss of Credit penalty.

“It’s nobody’s fault, it’s just a matter of time,” Goodwin said. “Now it should be in place.”