PEORIA, Ill. – The Peoria County Regional Office of Education is working to reduce truancy in all of its schools.
An investment into more case workers by the Peoria County Board has helped make it possible. In October, the board approved more than $200,000 to fund four case workers for the office’s Project Target and Project Start programs.
The programs use case workers to discover the reasons for constant truancy from a student.
Superintendent Beth Crider tells WMBD’s “The Phil Luciano Show” that there’s a wide range of reasons for a student not showing up to class.
“We had one case worker that found a family with no diapers and no food in the home for four kids, and that was the Monday before Thanksgiving,” Crider said. “We had a second grader whose parents had been incarcerated, so he was living with grandma and was refusing to go to school, and grandma was struggling to get him there.”
Crider says other examples include a lack of transportation to get kids to immunization appointments, and a family not being able to wash clothes for school. She says when families are dealing with situations such as those, going to school is not the top priority for them.
The programs and case workers then find out what is needed to help reduce the stresses and get the student to school. She says the goal is to have 80% attendance for a truant student over an eight week period.
Crider says overall, truancy cases have gone up since October when the new case workers were hired, but notes that’s due to hidden cases being discovered and taken care of. She says since October, they have resolved 80 cases where students are regularly attending.
One concern that Crider says needs to be addressed is how to get a student up to speed on what coursework they have missed.
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