With school attendance in the area decreasing over the last several years, Lauderdale County School District officials are crafting a plan to make sure the students who are enrolled in school come to school.

It’s not only the educationally sound thing to do, officials say, but it’s also necessary to maximize state funding, which is based on Average Daily Attendance during the second and third months of the school year.

“We decided to form a committee to look at our attendance issues, our enrollment decrease, our incentive policy that we currently have, and we charged this group with the task of developing a district attendance plan,” said DeShannon Davis, the director of federal programs for the Lauderdale County School District, at a school board meeting in June.

A significant part of the district’s state — or Mississippi Adequate Education Program — funding is determined by the Average Daily Attendance during October and November. Districts receive funding according to a “base student cost” for each student counted. Other factors contribute to MAEP funding, as well.

During the 2013-14 school year, enrollment for the district stood at 6,787, according to the Mississippi Department of Education. In the 2016-2017 school year, enrollment totaled 6,506. The decrease is not limited to the Lauderdale County School District. In the Meridian Public School District, over that same period, enrollment dropped from 6,166 to 5,557.

Davis said LCSD officials have decided to shift away from focusing overly hard on enrollment, and to focus instead on attendance.

“Now we want to worry about the students we actually have in the Lauderdale County School District — getting them to school,” Davis said at the board meeting last month. “If we can get them to school during months two and three, our ADA is going to be higher, which means that’s going to correlate with the funding we receive from the state. Even though our enrollment is decreasing, the ones that we do have, we need in school.”

Speaking in her office on Tuesday, Davis said the plan will be called #challenge39 — named for all of the attendance days in October and November — and that it will be rolled out to the principals and assistant principals on July 25.

The attendance rate for the district was 95 percent last November, Davis said. But that still meant several thousand absences and, she noted, room for improvement.

Davis stressed, too, that district officials are working to improve attendance for far-reaching educational reasons, as well as to help solidify state funding. She noted a goal of “early intervention,” or trying to establish strong attendance patterns in early grades.

“Research has shown that if we can establish a good attendance pattern early in their career it’s going to help them when they get into middle and high school,” she said on Tuesday.

Ken Hardy, principal of Clarkdale High School, said attendance at the high school level is sometimes affected by jobs that keep students up late the night before school, along with academic struggles that leave some students feeling less than hopeful about their prospects.

With regard to students who work late, Hardy said, “We just try to get them to focus on the long term…Staying in school, making sure we’re at school so we can keep our grades up, will create the most earning potential throughout our lifetimes.”

Hardy also noted “safety nets,” including credit recovery options, that can help students who have fallen behind.

Davis said, too, that the district will be using technology for the first time this school year that automatically calls students’ homes to let parents or guardians know if children are absent during the first 20 minutes of the school day. She said the system will be used district-wide.

Randy Hodges, the superintendent of the Lauderdale County School District, also stressed the importance of attendance when it comes to state funding.

“We depend in a big way on that third month,” he said after last month’s meeting. “If you’re losing (students) overall and your attendance is not good, it can be significant — and we, as well as other districts, have had a decline in overall enrollment.”

Davis said principals will come up with incentive plans for their schools, and that the district as a whole will create a “friendly competition” for strong attendance.

“We’re going to see who has the highest attendance rate for months two and three in our data, and they will be crowned the county champions,” she said. “They will have a trophy and have their school names on it.”