For over half a decade, Bowie students utilized the school’s attendance incentives, but this year, until October 18, incentives were a thing of the past. With important factors changing leading up to the second grading period, incentives were able to make their return. 

At the beginning of the school year, incentives were halted to help prevent students from coming to school sick. Now, with the spread of COVID-19 decreasing throughout the city of Austin and the COVID-19 risk stage lowering from Stage 5 to Stage 3, it became safe to reintroduce the incentives for the second nine weeks.

“We talked about what stage we would need to be at and we finally just decided to not put a number on it,” School Improvement Facilitator Ruth Widner said. “Instead we left it open so we could evaluate all the factors.”

The incentives were resumed on October 18 with the introduction of the quarantine or “QT” code. If a student has to quarantine the “QT” code is used, distinguishing the absence related to the pandemic from other types of absences and not counting against a student’s attendance incentive. One worry for teachers is students not keeping up with work while quarantining.

“The [quarantined students] come back really far behind and can’t catch up,” Algebra teacher Jessica Conn said. “My concern would be I don’t want those kids to have an incentive. I think that they need to show me on the final exam that they can do the work, and if they’re not showing me that on the final exam then I don’t feel great about giving them a passing grade.”

The restrictions to the incentive policy still remain the same as the previous year’s incentive policy. If a student has 12 or fewer absences and no more than three absences in a single class they get an incentive, allowing them to have one class’ exam score not affect their six-week average. With eight or fewer absences and two or fewer absences in one class, a student would get two incentives. 

“It’s a huge project,” Widner said. “You’ve got 3000 kids they each have eight classes, we count them class by class, and each one of those is coded in a certain way, so it’s just a massive undertaking so if we didn’t have the codes right, we wouldn’t really be able to do it in a way that didn’t punish kids if they were quarantined.”

With the beginning of the second nine weeks, the incentive policy is back in place and has led to some form of relief for Bowie students. 

“When the incentive policy came back, I was glad because I have a really heavy course load and I have test anxiety, so finals always cause a lot of stress for me,” senior Lizzie Jensen said.