BERKELEY SPRINGS, W.Va. — Chronic absenteeism is an issue that Morgan County Schools has been hoping to address this school year.
Morgan County Schools’ stated goal for the 2025-2026 school year is to have less than 15% of its students chronically absent.
A student is considered chronically absent if they miss more than 10% of the school year.
In a social media post Wednesday, the school system provided an update on chronic absenteeism in the district at the end of the second nine weeks. Those numbers showed slight improvement in some schools but an overall increase in absenteeism district wide from just over 17 percent to just over 18 percent from the first nine weeks to the second:
BSHS: 19.04%
PPES: 25.00%
PPHS: 14.29%
PVES: 18.81%
WSIS: 16.03%
WSMS: 17.66%
WES: 19.66%
MCS: 18.39%
By comparison, an announcement in October at the end of the first nine weeks revealed the following percentages:
BSHS: 15.61%
PPES: 23.61%
PPHS: 16.67%
PVES: 16.55%
WSIS: 15.91%
WSMS: 15.74%
WES: 22.59%
MCS District Average: 17.11%
Morgan County Schools Assistant Superintendent Jeromy Duelley , who appeared on Panhandle Live talked about efforts to combat truancy in the county.
“Just to give kind of a historical perspective on that, last year in Morgan County we did really, really well in in our on the academic side of things, we were ranked 10th in the state and English language arts, 20th in the state in math and we were ranked 14th in the state in science overall,” he said.
“However, on the attendance side of things, we did not do so hot.”
“We actually increased from 22% being chronically absent in 2324 to 25% of our students being chronically absent,” Duelley said.
That prompted the district to take action, including what he called multi tiered support.
“We’ve done that across the board with a lot of different issues. For many years (we) were looking at truancy — unexcused versus excused absences,” he said.
Now, “It is truly absenteeism. It doesn’t matter if it’s excused or if it’s unexcused. So one thing that we do is whenever we have any student that gets to ten total absences, whether that be excused or unexcused, we hold Student Assistance Team meeting” for the student that involves the family.
