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CONTACTS:
Principal Jennifer Haliski
Blossom Gulch Elementary School
333 S. 10th St.
Coos Bay, OR 97420
541-267-1341
Blossom Gulch Elementary School is seeking the cure for the uncommon attendance problem.
The Coos Bay school linked staff mentors with pupils who were chronically late, chronically absent or both. Mentors set timeliness and attendance goals with their pupils; met them at the school door; checked their progress each day; and gave them customized rewards for meeting their targets.
Tardiness dropped significantly in seven of 10 pupils who completed the program in 2004-05. Attendance proved a tougher challenge, with four of the 10 pupils actually missing more days than before joining the program, and the remainder showing no progress.
Blossom Gulch Principal Jennifer Haliski, who introduced the program and acted as a mentor herself, says the program is part of a larger effort to help disengaged families and children feel that someone cares about them at school. She says she plans to continue the mentoring effort in the year ahead.
BACKGROUND
Haliski started the program near the end of 2003-04, her first year as principal after several years as a teacher. She noticed that most of the tardiness and absenteeism in her 540-pupil school came from a small percentage of children. Letters and phone calls to the parents of those pupils weren’t making a dent in the problem.
“I’d seen that model and knew it didn’t work very well,” Haliski says. “People became defensive. I wanted to change the focus so the child was motivated. I wanted to make the child excited about coming to school.”
Haliski was familiar with a similar mentoring program in Springfield and decided to use many of its features. After starting the Blossom Gulch program, she came across research by the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory that confirmed her thinking.
Initial success in 2003-04 prompted the school to continue the program in 2004-05.
PROGRAM FEATURES
The program involved six staff members: Haliski, a counselor, a nurse and three secretaries. They met twice in February to get organized.
During their meetings they identified 12-15 pupils who had problems with tardiness and absenteeism, and weren’t showing signs of improvement. Next each team member chose pupils to mentor based in part on existing positive connections with those pupils.
Parents were called to alert them to the program. However, parents were not the program’s focus.
Mentors met with their pupils to set progress goals, discuss ways to improve and determine meaningful rewards. Haliski even provided alarm clocks to help some of her pupils arrive on time and taxi rides when they couldn’t make it to school otherwise.
Once the program started at the beginning of March, mentors greeted their pupils as they arrived at school each morning and checked up on them if they didn’t make it to school. When the pupils attended, they met with their mentors to mark charts that tracked their attendance and timeliness. When a chart showed that a pupil’s target had been reached, the pupil became eligible for a reward.
Rewards were specific to each pupil. For Haliski’s pupils, the reward was lunch with friends in the principal’s office. For others, just putting stickers on their charts was enough, Haliski says.
The program required no extra funding and was not subject to school board approval.
PROGRAM RESULTS
Ten pupils stayed with the program from March through the end of the school year.
Overall, their tardiness dropped to an average of 2.6 tardy days per pupil per month from 3.7 per month. Seven pupils made even better progress, cutting their tardiness to an average of 0.9 per month. Tardiness rates for the other three rose.
Attendance for the 10 remained a problem. Before the project started, they averaged 0.9 absence per pupil per month. During the project, the average rose to 1.5 absences per pupil per month. Six students showed no change in absenteeism, while four worsened.
THE FUTURE
Principal Haliski says she would like to expand the program in 2005-06 to include 20 pupils, about the total number of pupils in the school who have chronic absence and tardiness problems. She says she also would like to start the program in December.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
Increasing Student Attendance: Strategies From Research and
Practice, June 2004, Northwest Regional Educational
Laboratory (249k  )
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