Three years ago, Natrona County School District passed many policies. The main one was involving students school attendance. This policy had and still has people shaking their heads.

Board Policy 5120 states, “Our community expects students to be present and participate in class every day, just as they expect their employees to be at work.”

Every student at the high school level is only permitted five parent-excused absences in each class. After five unexcused absences, parents and students will be notified for a mandatory intervention guided by the principal. If these conditions are not met, and three additional unexcused absences occur, this will result in loss of credit for that particular class.

The school district leaders believed kids were missing too much school for not good enough reasons. For example, kids are missing school because of illness, vacation, family accidents, etc. But the board members think it’s just simply because they don’t want to come and participate.

When the attendance policy was announced the summer of 2015, most of the community was curious to see how NCSD would actually handle and control this situation. A handful of students and parents believed that they would follow through with it in the beginning, but then it would soon diminish.

Most people had no problem with the attendance rules before it drastically changed.

“I have above average grades and all my work is always done whenever I miss a class. It just seems unfair that I could potentially lose a credit for a class when I have an A in it,” says senior Jill Phipps, “If you can handle not going to school and still holding a good grade then you should not be punished for it.”

Three years later and Casper citizens are still not pleased over this policy. Not only do the students get punished for missing school, the guardians do too. It was said that if a student missed too much school with not being excused, school authorities could check living environments to see if it was stable conditions.

Lance Adams expressed how he feels about the attendance policy, “I know that they say ‘when you get a job you are not going to be able to miss whenever you want’, but at the same time, we don’t get paid to go to school.”

Even though the attendance policy will not be changing any time soon, people still disagree with the rules that are in place.