More than a third of all Española Middle School students were habitually absent during the 2015-2016 School Year, which means they had what equaled 10 or more absences from the time school started in August, until it ended in May.
Altogether, the data shows that 35 percent of the District’s seventh and eighth graders missed more than 10 days of school. That number is a slight decline from the approximate 37.7 percent recorded a year earlier, during the 2014-2015 School Year.
Although District officials are not frowning at the 2.6-percent drop in the Middle School’s truancy rate, they want to see that number further decline by using resources obtained through a $303,000 New Mexico Public Education Department grant.
This is the third consecutive year District officials have successfully applied for the Truancy and Dropout Prevention Coaches Program.
The award for the upcoming fiscal year will pay for a total of six student success specialists, or truancy coaches, which is one more than the five it funded in previous years.
The grant application’s author, District Special Project and Strategic Planner Denise Johnston, said the District replaced the truancy coach title with the student success specialist title because of its negative connotation.
The additional specialist will give the District one for each grade level, with an overall goal of decreasing the percentage of truant students by five percent for middle school students, and three percent for high school students.
When the District’s $15,750 burden cost to cover benefits is added to the $45,000 per year salary of each specialist, the program will cost a total of $364,500. The remaining sum will have to be pulled from other sources such as the operational fund.
The specialists will use the same three-tier approach they implemented in recent years to address absenteeism.
Tier one involves identifying students who exhibit early warning signs and monitoring them, not only for attendance, but also for academic performance and behavior.
Tier two involves working with students who’s early warning signs manifested in them becoming habitually truant. This step could involve developing an academic improvement plan and/or issuing behavior contracts.
Besides helping students access the resources, such as tutoring, credit recovery and counseling they need to realize academic success, the specialists will work with both students and parents, to get at the root cause, of a student’s absence.
The third tier is the intensive intervention phase. Students make it to this phase when the other two phases aren’t effective in addressing the student’s issues.
It involves intense counseling, home visits and in some cases, bringing in law enforcement and other agencies, when the other interventions don’t work.
“Our student (school) resource officers have taken an active role in this work,” the grant application states. “They have made student home welfare checks and visits to parents’ places of employment.”
School resource officers are sworn Rio Arriba County Sheriff’s deputies who are stationed at the middle school and high school, per an agreement with the District.
The specialists have also referred several students to New Mexico law enforcement and other state agencies.
“It is in this tier, that other service provider partners will be contacted, and in some instances, referrals will be made from the school to outside agencies such as Children Youth and Families (Department),” the application states. “This year, to date, we have made 34 referrals to the Juvenile Probation Office/Teen Court.”
The Juvenile Probation Office is an arm of the Department responsible for juvenile delinquency.
Student Success Specialist Marcella Maestas has worked with the truancy initiative since its inception at the start of the 2015 School Year. She said addressing the District’s truancy issues involves changing what she believes are long-standing attitudes toward school attendance.
“It feels like it is a community norm for students not to be in school,” she said. “I really do believe that if the community would see the big picture of truancy, things would change. This is a community problem and we need to acknowledge that.”
She said when students aren’t at school, that means they are left to their own devices at home, or in the community, which could translate to crime or other mischief.
Maestas said she believes the program officials have a couple of years of past experience from which to draw, so they won’t have any problem meeting their target goals.
The program will partner with various area businesses and organizations to establish incentives they hope will help encourage students to attend school.
“Last year, we had a tremendous amount of community members and business owners give us gift certificates for incentives,” she said. “It was really cool because it shows the community is starting to see this as a community problem.”
Maestas hopes to expand the District’s Link Crew Mentorship Initiative, that pairs incoming freshman with their successful upperclassmen peers.
“We really work with them by empowering them to make good decisions,” Maestas said. “A lot of them are lost and we need to make them feel valued.”