BY DANA DiFILIPPO
The Cincinnati Enquirer
To crack down on truancy, Cincinnati Public Schools will create attendance-monitoring teams, forge partnerships with outside agencies and have students' driver's licenses revoked.
Lionel Brown, the district's director of student affairs, presented recommendations Wednesday for the first phase of the district's new attendance plan.
The first-phase recommendations are initiatives that can be implemented at no cost.
Other recommendations that cost money or must be investigated more thoroughly may be adopted later. Those include sending chronic school-skippers to alternative sites or schools, withholding the welfare checks of truant students' parents and requiring chronically absent students to attend Saturday school.
The recommendations to be implemented this year include:
Surveying students, teachers and parents about causes of truancy. Developing a public awareness campaign.
Activating computerized home-dialer message systems in schools that already have them to alert parents about unexcused absences. Forming local school attendance teams to monitor truancy and develop strategies to fight it.
Revoking the driver's licenses of truant teens after unexcused absences of 10 consecutive days, or 15 days total in a semester. Partnering with outside agencies to fight truancy.
Improving accounting of students who are "present at another location," such as community-based social-service programs. Reinforcing laws already on the books regarding truancy.
Some of the recommendations echo policies that already exist but aren't adequately enforced, such as revoking school-skippers' driver's licenses, Dr. Brown said.
"We want to improve on those areas that may have been done haphazardly," he said.
Board members greeted the recommendations with nods of approval Wednesday.
"I don't want us to put the wrong Band-Aid on the wrong problem," board member Sally Warner said, "like if they can't get to school because they have legitimate transportation problems."
