Tardy, truant U-46 students targeted

All five Elgin Area District U-46 high schools will soon implement an attendance program and policy aimed at promoting regular attendance and promptness.

The school board Monday unanimously approved a high school attendance policy that deals with two components of students absenteeism: class tardies, or truancy, and overall absences. The school board also approved a student identification scanning system that has been in place at South Elgin High School for the past year.

Changes will take effect in the 2011-12 school year.

Greg Walk, superintendent of secondary education, said the newly adopted policy and system will streamline processes in dealing with tardiness and absenteeism.

“The current program relies on the human resources department to track students down,” Walker said. “This prints off a tardy pass when a student's ID is scanned.”

The program consists of a five-step process that allows students to earn back privileges and be rewarded for positive behavior. Steps include an automated phone call home upon three tardies, up to the loss of all extracurricular activities after 13 tardies. A tardy is defined as being five minutes or less late.

If students are able to show positive attendance behavior with no tardies for five consecutive school days, they will automatically move to the previous step in the program.

Conversely, the program could result in the board of education removing a student from school for excessive absenteeism.

“Tardiness is a behavioral action, and if a student is proficient in a class, their grades should reflect that,” Walker said. “Now, a student could do well academically and lose credit because they are tardy. We don't believe that consequence is appropriate for an attendance policy.”

In addition, Walker said the current program has too many gaps for students to fall through. Walker said because the current program relies on human input, students are able to “play” the system.