Will County Gazette

During a recent meeting, the Joliet Township School District Board of Education received an update from its director of student support services, who provided an annual update of the department.

During a presentation at the Jan. 17 meeting, streamed on YouTube, Director of Student Support Services Brett Marcum provided an update on strategic objectives for the department, including a strategic objective to close the education gap existing among subgroups and improving the graduation rate across the board. He also said the goal is that by 2027 every student will be finishing post-secondary education. Addressing attendance, he noted that is a focus on the dean’s office.

“And you know that we're spending a lot of time there trying to restore students' changed behavior. And that takes a significant amount of time,” Marcom said during his presentation. “In an old punitive system, you come, we suspend you, we move on. That's not what we're asking them to do anymore. We're asking them to spend time with students, to communicate with parents, to have meetings.”

Marcum also noted during the presentation that attendance continues to be a topic of concern in the district and Joliet isn’t unique, with it being a problem statewide and nationally. He also noted that chronic absenteeism, when a student misses more than 10% of school days during the year, and 41.7% of students at Joliet Central fall under this category, while 57.9% of students at Joliet Central are chronically absent. Marcum noted that there are several options being considered to solve the problem.

“So the first is a program that District 86 adopted this year that automates some of that communication,” he said during the presentation. “They take it on behalf of us so instead of hiring more staff, training more staff and handling it ourselves. This team will work with that, with our district data and our technology department to manage and automate some of that. And then we're also proposing a position, a school attendance and engagement interventionist.”

Marcum pointed out that messaging systems alert parents when their child is not in school and another option would have a staff member make a personal call to the home. Some of these efforts could be automated, while the addition of a school attendance interventionist could also help the situation.

Marcum also noted that the department has focused on post-secondary planning, hoping to work with students to set goals and develop plans, which ultimately could also boost attendance as students strive to hit these goals. This includes discussion about college trade school, military or other options, with a goal of improving upon the Class of 2022’s rate of post-secondary plans of just 28%.