Marshall Metro High School Case Study

In the case study, Marshall Metro High School is in great dilemma over the truancy and grades of the students attending the school. The truancy staff initially spent two hours every day calling every student that had not reported in by 9:30 am. but the data showed that only 9% of those students called ever showed up so they decided to change tactics. Ms. Henry, the head of the truancy office, decided to start calling the habitual late comers at 6:30 am which resulted in 19 out of the 26 students showing up to school (Ferrell, Gatewood, Ferrell, & Taylor, 2010).

Ms. Henry then decided to start incentive programs that offered prices for students that signed in for a certain amount of consecutive days which offered things such as MP3 players. When started, they set the days at 30 and soon realized it was too many for students to maintain even for a prize incentive. They then lowered the set number of days to 10 days and had much better results. Ms. Henry and her team spend many hours of overtime brainstorming and collaborating on how to manage the truancy
If the students are missing a large number of days, they are not able keep up with the work in the classroom. With that being said, this also interferes with the other students because the teachers have to go back and go over previous information which takes away from learning time from the students attending class on a regular basis. The teachers have recently been taxed with accounting for the grades the students are making in their classes. This has caused great distress with the teachers over their pay and even their jobs. Even though it is said to be illegal to use student’s grades to judge the efficiency of a teacher, it is a well know practice. This has caused some of the teachers to go as far as to forge some of the student’s grades even though these students cannot pass the basic standardized testing (Ferrell, Gatewood, Ferrell, & Taylor,