How clean laundry affects student attendance rates
According to Whirlpool’s Care Counts™ School Laundry Program, teachers around the country believe that approximately one in five students encounter difficulties when it comes to regularly having clean clothes. Many of the teachers surveyed also believe that lack of clean clothes causes students to be frequently absent, an issue that affects 5 to 10 million students each year.
To further test how not having clean clothes influences attendance rates, the Care Counts™ program is installing washers and dryers in schools to improve student participation by allowing parents who don’t have access to working machines to go to the school to clean their families’ laundry. So far, Whirlpool has installed washers and dryers in 58 schools in 10 districts. Parents are also becoming more involved with their children’s schools by volunteering for different tasks around the campus as they wait for their laundry to finish cleaning.
Since the launch of the program, 91% of high-risk students (those missing 15 or more days during the school year, or an average of one-and-a-half absences per month) increased their attendance during the 2016-2017 program, a 9% boost from the year before. In addition to improved attendance rates, teachers surveyed during the 2015-2016 school year also saw that:
- 89% of students’ classroom participation increased
- 95% of students were more motivated in class
- 95% of students participated in more extracurricular activities
When kids don’t have to worry about finding clean clothes to wear, they are more confident and more involved in school.
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