Though attendance charges at Evergreen Public Faculties are rising, the district is working with a Washington State College program to additional enhance the variety of college students exhibiting up for college.
The brand new partnership is with the college’s Washington Evaluation of the Dangers and Wants of College students program for Evergreen’s 2024-25 college yr. This system is a web-based 40-question survey for center and highschool college students. The questions deal with six classes: aggression and defiance, melancholy and anxiousness, substance use, peer deviance, college engagement and household atmosphere.
“The really cool thing about EPS right now is the proactive approach of expanding student services and looking at attendance. That has been at a downfall throughout our entire country since COVID-19,” stated Jason Castro, Evergreen’s assistant director of pupil providers. “And we’re already seeing large growth right now, and then we think that with WARNS rolling it out, it’s only going to help us to ultimately get kids in school and be successful.”
Within the 2023-24 college yr, 61.8 % of Evergreen college students attended 90 % or extra college days, in line with the state’s Workplace of Superintendent of Public Instruction. In 2024, October and November district attendance improved by 6 % in contrast with these months in 2023.
Heritage Excessive College, Frontier Center College, Burton Elementary College and York Elementary College had been acknowledged on the Jan. 14 college board assembly for enhancing attendance this yr in contrast with the earlier college yr.
Nonetheless, Evergreen’s focus is to cut back persistent absenteeism by 10 % this college yr, Govt Director of Packages and College Efficiency Heather Fowler stated on the assembly.
“We’re doing a good job with it, but the difference with what WARNS will provide is that it will compile all of that student data,” Castro stated.
He stated every college’s questionnaire is slightly totally different; some have paper copies, others have on-line surveys. He continued, “We’ll be able to ascertain immediately which categories that students need extra support in.”
“We are required by the state to do some sort of a survey to get to the root of the issue for why the student is chronically absent,” Castro stated. “The biggest thing that we are getting at is that we can’t help if we don’t know what the issue is.”
Final week, Evergreen reached out to its colleges to start out piloting this system, Castro stated, however he doesn’t know precisely how it is going to be used. Trying to the longer term, one concept is to have every pupil who’s chronically absent take the questionnaire, he stated, and one other concept is to manage it to each sixth- via Twelfth-grade pupil at first of the college yr as a baseline.
The WARNS program began in 2008 on the Washington State Heart for Court docket Analysis and moved to WSU in 2017.
“It’s a tool that schools can use to understand more information about the context of their students, to help have conversations with those students, to try to figure out what’s going on in their life, to help them get reengaged in school,” stated Brian French, a WSU regents professor who’s labored with WARNS for a few decade.
The college companions with about 140 public colleges across the state. Vancouver and Evergreen are the one college districts in Clark County to make use of this system up to now.
About 15 different organizations, together with courts and youth service suppliers, additionally use this system to evaluate particular person dangers and desires, in line with WSU’s WARNS webpage.
“It’s not meant to be any kind of punitive measure or a score that is used to make a decision about someone immediately,” French stated. “It gives probably different insights than you might receive if the school was just asking these questions directly. It gives a student a chance to self-report on this.”