Selma City Schools works to motivate moms to get students to attend school

Selma City Schools is working to tackle the reasons behind a decline in recorded performance that led to the district’s grade on the state report card dropping to a D. 

Superintendent Dr. Zickeyous Byrd listed to the Rotary Club on Monday key reasons the district fell from a 72 to a 67 on the Alabama State Report Card released late last year by the Alabama Department of Education. 

Absenteeism. 

Selma schools were among the last to return from remote learning after the COVID pandemic, restarting school in fall 2021. Then a student died of a fentanyl overdose in the cafeteria at Selma High in November 2022. Then a tornado struck the city and displaced families in January 2023. Then Byrd points to a crime spree of drive-by shootings in spring 2023, including one that led to the death of a Payne Elementary kindergartner in March. 

“In my 25 years in education, I have never witnessed a school year like that,” Byrd said. 

Byrd said it took weeks for students to want to eat in the lunchroom again after the student died on his lunch table. In the year since the tornado, many families are still living in hotels, he said. And there are many other excuses parents and children are giving for not sending students to school every day. 

To improve attendance, which determines funding, Selma schools are trying to address the root causes, specifically the issues around having 70 to 80 percent of students being raised in single mother and grandparent households, Byrd said. The district is working to provide resources to those moms like Motivational Mondays for Moms and a seminar in February called “Raising Boys: What a Single Mother Should Know” to show the community how to help boys become successful men. 

“We are giving them skills, helping moms find jobs,” Byrd said. “We are providing wrap around services to address the root cause. We want them to know how much we care.” 

Selma schools also instituted an incentive program for families at the housing developments to be entered to win $500 for each child that has perfect attendance. 

The district has other motivators to get students to school, he said, including outreach to the children themselves to want to be there. 

Athletics is a motivator, so they added more options like golf, tennis, e-sports and wrestling this year and will expand to soccer next year, Byrd said. 

Selma City Schools is building a new middle school replacement for School of Discovery that focuses on the arts. Byrd said they could consider being innovative by starting a elementary charter school that could feeder students to the new arts middle school. It would have its own board but operate with Selma City Schools. 

Selma schools has nine tech programs for students wanting a vocational education instead of college and they are adding two more next year. The goal for those students is to be credentialed in a trade before graduation, Byrd said. 

Selma High’s partnership with Wallace Community College Selma continues to go strong, he said, with 150 students in dual enrollment to get college credit and some achieving an associate’s degree by the time they graduate from high school.  

Those options make school attendance worth it, he said. 

“We’re begging parents to send their children to school, but many children make the decisions in the home now, so we are motivating them to want to come.”