Follow up on Absence from School

At Rustenburg the safety of the girls is of paramount and for this reason we will be introducing a change to the absentee procedure from this term.

We have been concerned that there is sometimes a long delay between a girl being marked as absent and receiving confirmation of this fact from parents or guardian. It would be possible for a child to go missing en route from home to school and for an entire day to pass with the parent assuming that she was safe at school and the school assuming she was sick at home.

In the future, an SMS will be sent out from our SMSweb system to the registered parent of each child marked absent by 10am on each day. If your child is indeed sick or missing school for some other legitimate reason, you need not respond, but if you expect her to be at school, then please contact the school office immediately so that we can follow up on her.

There are many reasons that a child could be mistakenly marked as absent (e.g. being late for roll-call, meeting with a teacher during form class, etc) but we do want to make sure that everyone is accounted for every day. To this end, we need to ask you to make sure that we have the most up-to-date cellphone number for your family stored in our SMSweb system at all times – this is the facility that regularly sends you notices and reminders.

Only one cellphone number per child is stored unless there are extraordinary circumstances involved. You can let us know of changes by contacting the front office or emailing info@rghs.org.za

Mrs Schnetler, Deputy Head