NORTHRIDGE : Attendance Proves Students Enjoy School

The kids at Darby Avenue Elementary love to go to school. Really.

They actually ask their teachers if they can come to school on Saturdays. They enthusiastically volunteer to pick up trash that’s scattered about campus.

The proof of their enthusiasm is in the attendance records.

“The superintendent (of the Los Angeles Unified School District) wants us to have the goal of 95% attendance,” said Principal Sidney Yukelson on Friday when he announced Darby’s latest attendance records.

“We’re one of three schools that has met that goal.”

By having students participate in group projects with their classmates, sponsoring special event days and promoting school spirit, Darby has increased attendance, and also Darby’s funding level. Schools are allotted about $17 per student for every day they are in school, or absent due to illness.

“If the kids are here more, they have to learn more,” Yukelson said.

The fifth-graders in Dan Kunisaki’s class just completed a unit on Native Americans during which youngsters were divided into groups and assigned a tribe to research and report on.

Kunisaki said “some kids wanted to stay after school and come on weekends” when they were building dioramas of their tribes’ villages. They are having so much fun, he said, that it doesn’t seem like schoolwork.

Ten-year-old Nicholas Wilson said he especially enjoyed making models of a temple and pyramids from wood, clay and sand while the class studied Native Americans of the Mississippi.

“You talk with everyone and you make new friends,” Nicholas said.

Yukelson sponsors a campus beautification program in which student volunteers wear fluorescent orange Caltrans worker vests and pick up trash during recess and lunch with mechanical litter pickers.

“We just pick up the trash and ask other people to pick it up,” said Ashley Mintz, 8, as she scampered around the playground in search of garbage.

Sharing pride in the school, Yukelson will frequently stop a group of students on their way back to class and ask, “What’s the best school in the universe?” And they always reply, gleefully and in unison, “Darby!”