The main weakness of the k-Nearest Neighbor algorithm in face recognition is calculating the distance and sort all training data on each prediction which can be slow if there are a large number of training instances. This problem can be solved by utilizing the priority k-d tree search to speed up the process of k-NN classification. This paper proposes a method for student attendance systems in the classroom using facial recognition techniques by combining three levels of Discrete Wavelet Transforms (DWT) and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to extract facial features followed by applying the priority of k-d tree search to speed up the process of facial classification using k-Nearest Neighbor. The proposed algorithm is tested on two datasets that are Honda/UCSD video dataset and our dataset (AtmafaceDB dataset). This research looks for the best value of k to get the right facial recognition using k-fold cross-validation. 10-fold cross-validation at level 3 DWT-PCA shows that face recognition using k-Nearest Neighbor on our dataset is 95.56% with k = 5, whereas in the Honda / UCSD dataset it is only 82% with k = 3. The proposed method gives computational recognition time on our dataset 40 milliseconds.