Colette Moffroid | A & E Editor
May 27, 2025
During the COVID-19 pandemic every student was forced to stay home, confined to their houses and attending school online from their rooms over Zoom. During this time, many of us got accustomed to staying in the comfort of our homes and completing our school work online without any interaction with teachers or other peers. After the pandemic, many schools kept some of the same online curriculum in their schedules and as a result many students didn’t feel the need to attend school or consult other people like teachers to complete their work.
Following the school year of 2021-2022, which had the largest percent of students chronically absent, the crisis has still not been resolved and the absence rates are still significantly higher than prior to the pandemic. Not only are attendance rates now down throughout the whole year, but following the completion of AP testing, there is also a spike in absences.
Students who take AP and higher level classes throughout high school are often seen having higher attendance rates throughout the majority of the year. However, once the AP tests are over around mid-May, there is no longer any curriculum for the teachers to teach these students and therefore it is difficult to find a necessary reason to attend classes.
In AP and IB classes, the teachers have a large amount of curriculum to shove into about eight months of class time before the AP and IB exams. However, once the exam season is over, there aren’t any more lessons to teach or learn. Many teachers have started to create large projects to take up the two to three weeks before school ends. Junior Stella Nelson mentioned that “in [her] English class [her] teacher has assigned an IB research project for [her] and [her] group to complete in a few weeks.”
However, some teachers have resorted to showing movies a few times a week. Junior Margot Lee stated that in one of her AP classes she has seen “three movies in one week and [has not] done any work whatsoever” with classes filling time with entertainment. Wouldn’t it be better for the students to just stay home where they can watch movies from the comfort of their couches?
I believe that in order to bring down absence rates and keep students engaged throughout the whole year, AP testing should either be moved to a later part of the school year or teachers should have interesting and meaningful ways to fill a class period so students don’t feel as though they are wasting their time.
Leave a Reply