CALIFORNIA STATE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION

MANAGEMENT ADVISORY 90-07

Date: July 2, 1990

Subject: Amendments to Education Code Section 47170, concerning attendance credit for continuation schools and classes

In one of its provisions, Chapter 1256, Statutes of 1989 (effective October 1, 1989, as an "urgency" measure) amended the Education Code Section that limits attendance credit for continuation education pupils.

Prior to October 1, Section 46170 provided that "no [continuation] pupil.. shall be credited with more than 15 hours of attendance in any calendar week." Chapter 1256 changed that provision to read "no [continuation] pupil.. shall be credited with more than 15 hours of attendance per school week." (emphasis added) The new language is that of rate, an average across weeks.

Because 15 hours of attendance per week is the maximum amount of attendance with which a continuation pupil may be credited, it is not permissible to "bank" credit for surplus hours of attendance and carry it forward beyond the week in which it is generated. If a pupil generates less than 15 hours of credit within a full week, however, it then becomes permissible to credit a compensating amount of surplus hours generated in a later week. In this way, on average, the pupil may be credited with 15 hours per week since his or her first day of enrollment in the term. In simpler terms, it is not permissible for a pupil to "get ahead," but it is permissible for the pupil to "catch up."

In many continuation schools a pupil's actual attendance requirement is four hours per day, yielding a total for a five-day week of 20 hours of required attendance. As an example of the operation of Section 46170 as amended in a school with a 20-hour week, say that a particular pupil attends 20 hours the first week in the year, 10 hours the second week (with 10 hours of unapportionable absence), then 20 hours again the third week. Under the new language of Section 46170, the pupil would be credited at that point with a total of 45 hours of attendance, with a rate of ADA credit per week at the end of the first week of 15 hours (the other 5 cannot be carried forward), at the end of the second week 12.5 hours ( [15+10]/2), and at the end of the third week again 15 hours ([15+10+20] /3).

Because attendance is accounted on a school month basis, schools will need to include, in their monthly report for each month in which any continuation pupil is credited with more than 15 hours of attendance per week, a reference back to the previous month or months in which the pupil was credited with less than 15 hours per week--so that an auditor may easily determine the permissibility of crediting the surplus hours within the month at hand.

Chapter 1256 also spelled out in Section 46170 the requirement that the 15-hour-per-week maximum must be "proportionately reduced for those school weeks having weekday holidays on which classes are not held." Consistent with the Department of Education's interpretation of the prior form of Section 46170, this language means that the total number of apportionment hours possible for a given school week must be reduced by three hours for each weekday holiday on which classes are not held. In a week having only four days on which classes are held, for example, the maximum number of hours that could be claimed for a given pupil would be 12.