District enlists some outside aid to reduce truancy

Kingston school district officials have enlisted the aid of area businesses to help keep M. Clifford Miller Middle School students in class and also meet the needs of families that cannot afford school supplies.

School social worker Ann-Marie DiBella told the Board of Education last week that the effort includes identifying and encouraging about 40 students at the town of Ulster school who are frequently absent.

“Thirty-five out of the 40 had chronic attendance problems starting in first grade,” DiBella said. “So everything that now I ... and the support staff and the administration [are] doing in middle school is trying to undo and unravel into some of those patterns that were developed very early on in school and to change some of the ways these kids are thinking about coming to school.”

DiBella said six of the students have anxiety or social and emotional issues.

“The other 34 just fall into truancy,” she said. “But truancy ... is a very large umbrella of a lot of other issues going on in the kids’ lives.”

DiBella said working with parents is a major part of the effort to get children to school.

“There are parents who leave for work at 5 o’clock in the morning and don’t know that their kids are still in bed,” she said. “At the middle school level, [children] are really kind of left, in many families, to get themselves up and out the door.”

The district’s anti-truancy effort includes working with the Ulster County Regional Chamber of Commerce, the Kingston mayor’s office, the county Probation Department, the county Department of Social Services and the agency Family of Woodstock.

“We are going to ask businesses to place ... posters in their lunch rooms and break room that [say], ‘You’re here ... is your child at school?’ in both English and Spanish,” DiBella said. “We’ll also place these in pediatricians’ offices ... any place where parents will go.”

DiBella added that Hannaford is helping to provide food to school families that need it, while Walmart has committed to providing school supplies.

“Parents should have enough food so they can feed their kids so that they can get up in the morning and go to school,” she said.

School officials also have gotten agreements from two youth centers to initiate programs that emphasize the importance of attendance in classes.

“If kids are going to these after-school programs but have not been in school during the school day, they can still come in,” but the program leaders “are going to say, ‘OK, you can come and you can play basketball, you

can engage in these activities, but before you do that, we have some other activities we want you to do,” DiBella said. “We can have some restorative justice activities ... [filling out] reflection sheets on what they did during the day while they weren’t in school [and] what you can get if you get a high school diploma.”