Parents in Menominee County could soon face jail time if their children don’t start coming to school more often.
Menominee County Prosecutor Jeffrey Rogg recently unveiled a new truancy protocol called “Project Graduation” to address chronic absenteeism, and he’s putting parents on notice.
“My approach is going to be much different, it’s not going to be tolerant or encouraging, or at least, coercive encouraging,” Rogg told WLUC. “It’s going to be ‘you’ve got to get your kid to school or you can tell the judge why you’re not.”
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The final truancy protocols adopted last month apply to Menominee Area Public Schools, as well as North Central Area Schools, Stephenson Area Public Schools, Bark River Harris Schools, and Carney Nadeau Public School.
After five days of missed school, the protocol tasks school officials with sending a letter of concern to parents, with a second letter to set up an in-person meeting with a school administrator or truancy officer to develop an improvement plan after a total of eight missed days.
Step 3, triggered once absences reach 10, states “district administration will contact the MCISD truancy officer who will contact local police agency and provide the law enforcement truancy referral form with attachments” including a student attendance report, letter to parents, attendance improvement plan, attendance agreement, and other documents.
“Criminal charge(s) will be filed against parent(s) (when appropriate) and/or delinquency charge will be filed against the juvenile (when appropriate),” the protocol reads.
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“We’ve certainly had an uptick in chronic absenteeism in the last ten years. Last year in Menominee County, fully, 20% of the students were chronically absent county-wide. That is an unacceptable number no matter how we look at it,” Menominee County ISD Mental Health Director Mary Stein told WLUC.
“When we look at the manifest function of a school obviously it’s education but, there are lots of latent functions as well, relationship building, problem-solving, access to activities that otherwise a student wouldn’t have, if our students aren’t in school they miss out on all of those benefits, nutrition, health, all of it is there in our public schools,” Stein said.
Rogg noted “the criminal charge for parents mandates 48 hours in jail, no discretion for the court, so if that’s what it takes to get the kids in school, that’s what I’ll do.”
Chronic absenteeism, defined as students missing more than 10% of the school year or 18 days, remains a massive problem in Michigan five years after Gov. Gretchen Whitmer shuttered schools to in person instruction for nearly a year during the pandemic.
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An analysis by The Detroit News and The Associated Press released in August showed Michigan had the seventh highest absenteeism rate among states in the 2022-23 school year, with 30.8% of K-12 students missing 10% or more of the school year.
The data collected from 42 states and the District of Columbia by the AP and Stanford University economist Thomas Dee shows that figure dropped 7.7 percentage points from the year prior, but remained more than 5% higher than the national rate.
It was also significantly higher than Michigan’s 19.7% chronic absenteeism rate in the 2018-19 school year.
“About one-third of Michigan’s K-12 students – or 434,241 – missed 10% or more of school last school year, a level that remained far above absenteeism rates experienced before the COVID-19 pandemic,” The News reported in August.
The reasons why are largely tied to students’ home life, with many experiencing poverty, physical and mental health issues, and homelessness.
“Some students aren’t in school because they have to watch younger siblings or care for parents with medical problems. Others need to continue working at jobs they started during the pandemic. Some kids are overcome by anxiety and can’t leave the house, let along spend a full day in school,” according to The News.
“Some have become homeless for part of the year or changed school several times. In many cases, kids said they simply don’t want to go to school and parents let them stay home.”
Research analyzed by The New York Times correlates learning loss during the pandemic with the amount of time schools were closed to in-person learning.
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Other research suggests many of the mental health issues keeping kids from school now were exacerbated by more screen time, less physical activity, and increased stress during pandemic school closures.
In Michigan, where Whitmer banned in-person learning from March 16, 2020 to January 2021, one of the longest closures among states, fourth-grade reading scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress went from 32nd in the nation in 2019 to 43rd in 2022.
“Today, there is broad acknowledgement among many public health and education experts that extended school closures did not significantly stop the spread of Covid, while the academic harms for children have been large and long-lasting,” according to the Times.
A February report from researchers at Harvard and Stanford universities showed that while Michigan’s statewide student achievement increased by 7% of a grade level in math and 1% in reading over the prior year, “full recovery will require five additional years for students to recover in math and decades to recover in reading,” according to The News.