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Schools Unveil New App Aimed at Curbing
Juvenile Truancy
By Anne Yeager
January 28, 2019
In an effort to help students learn to address problems that keep them
from getting to school, a smartphone application, or app, has been
created to incentivize attendance at school.
The app is being piloted in Greene County before being rolled out
statewide.
The app is part of a pilot program called “The Right Track: Building
and Restoring Relationships for At-Risk, Truant, and all Students of
the Greene County School District in Ohio.” The program builds on the
needs of the whole student and includes conflict resolution resources,
community support, and school attendance mediation.
The partnership is led by the Ohio Supreme Court’s Commission on
Dispute Resolution and includes Ohio Department of Education, Xenia
Community Schools, Greene County Juvenile Court, Dayton Mediation
Center, and Resolution Systems Institute, a non-profit dispute
resolution organization conducting the evidence-based research on the
project.
“We are excited about the recent launch of a new conflict resolution
app in the Xenia School system,” said Greene County Juvenile Court
Judge Adolpho Tornichio. “We believe it will encourage this
technological generation on their own playing field to attend school
and will provide another tool for the schools and juvenile court to use
to combat our growing truancy problem.”
In January, nearly 50 students tested the app to log attendance,
absences, and find resources to help them if they were missing school
due to illness, lack of transportation, conflicts at school, or other
reasons. The app provides analytics to find out what community leaders
can do to reduce the number of absences and to better help at-risk
families.
“School attendance can provide the first opportunity to identify
children at risk of entering the juvenile justice system,” said Marion
County Family Judge Robert Fragale, the workgroup chair. “Issues with
attendance and behavior at school are an indication that a child may be
in the need of intervention by school and community partners for
services to assist the family in remedying these issues.”
The main goal is to equip students with problem-solving skills to solve
underlying problems that prevent them from getting to school and to
reduce filings in Greene County Juvenile Court.
So far, the results from the pilot project are encouraging. At the
close of the first semester of the 2018-2019 school year, the three
truancy interventionists have tried to or made contact with more than
500 students and their families. The interventionists take a
preventative approach to working with students experiencing attendance
issues by offering resources and support.
Students weighed in on the content and design of the app and made
recommendations for incentives to get students to return to, or stay,
in school. Kunz, Leigh, and Associates developed the app after getting
feedback from Ohio students.
The Ohio Supreme Court secured a $40,000 grant from the JAMS Foundation
and the Association for Conflict Resolution to develop the app. The
Ohio Department of Education also contributed funding.
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