A Tough Roll : L.A. Summer School Attendance-Keeping Rules Tax Teachers’ Time and Patience

Taking classroom attendance during these dog days of summer school is a doggone mess, say teachers and clerks in Los Angeles schools.

Local and state education rules that are as confounding as a puzzle have turned the simple ritual of taking roll into a befuddling exercise.

“My roll book looks like a jigsaw puzzle!” complained Stephanie Schwartz, an English teacher at Granada Hills High School. “The first week it took 30 minutes of instruction time to do it. This is outta sight!”

Many frustrated teachers such as Schwartz say that the regulations force them to take roll four times in a single class period. As a result, they are spending an inordinate amount of time drawing and shading in tiny boxes in their roll books.

In school offices all over the Los Angeles Unified School District, spectacled clerks have been bent over their desks, trying to become hieroglyphics experts overnight.

The policy has, however, managed to showcase the best in geometry teachers.

“The graphics don’t bother me,” quipped geometry and algebra teacher Ruth Hokinson, who proudly displayed her precision-scored book to the clerk at Eagle Rock High School.

Many say, however, that the new roll call practice is an example of “rules-driven” education policies that do little more than churn the wheels of bureaucracy at the expense of valuable classroom teaching.

“If you want to sit at your desk all day and book-keep, this is fine” said an exasperated Barbara Goodwin, an Eagle Rock High School computer technology instructor, who loathes this manual operation. “It’s not good if you want to get up and teach.”

The record-keeping frenzy reached a peak Tuesday, which was designated as “norm day,” the equivalent of an official district student census. Accurate student counts are tabulated on this day so that teacher slots and classes can be added or eliminated.

At Eagle Rock High School, Principal Beverley Clarkson, Assistant Principal Katharine Dustin and two office managers pored over the roll books, attempting to decipher the maze of marks.

“Looks like this was a substitute teacher who couldn’t figure it out,” said Dustin, surveying the scrawls in one book. The marks were just as confusing when the regular teacher returned.

“And this teacher is a competent woman, extremely competent under normal circumstances,” Dustin remarked.

The complexities of the policy are rooted in California’s two largest education bureaucracies: the State Department of Education and the Los Angeles Unified School District.

The education department funds summer school based on hourly, not daily, attendance rates. Each hour and fraction of an hour must be accounted for.

“The school records have to be configured in a way to show that each kid has been in attendance for each hour,” said John Gilroy, the state’s attendance accounting specialist. “What we are talking about is creating a simple audit trail to substantiate their claims for money.”

The Los Angeles school district decided to make summer school periods two hours and five minutes long this year to end the summer session a day earlier. School officials realized a bookkeeping nightmare loomed and sought a state waiver to relieve teachers from accounting for the final five minutes. No exceptions, the state said.

So the district devised a new roll call procedure, all of which must be recorded for each student each day within the confines of a quarter-inch box.

At the start of the period the teacher takes roll. If a student is absent, a cross is made dividing the box into four eighth-inch square sections.

Roll is then taken three more times--at the end of the first and second hour of class, and at the end of the five-minute fraction of the third hour. If a student is absent or leaves class at any point during those three time units, the teacher shades in a corresponding box. The fourth box is not to be touched.

“What?” said teacher union President Helen Bernstein. “This is dumb, dumb, dumb. . . . Couldn’t anyone think of a way to make this easier? I know, why don’t we just put a bar code strip on every kid and we can just scan their forehead four times a day.”