LET’S HEAR IT FOR THE TECHS: Left to right: Willie Martin, supervisor of the BUSD IT Department, Julie Klug, Robert Gonzales, Robert Wall, Chad Tuvey and Robert Fernandez. The department was lauded Thursday for getting the district’s new broadband and wireless technology online.
Keri Luiz/Staff

By Keri Luiz
Assistant Editor

In an effort to fight chronic student absenteeism in Solano County, the county’s superintendents, along with County Superintendent Jay Speck, have launched an initiative to support school attendance, Benicia Schools Superintendent Janice Adams told district trustees Thursday.

In its first meeting after a summer hiatus and last before next week’s start of the 2013-14 school year, however, the Benicia Unified School District board did not vote on a resolution to support the absenteeism initiative, instead tabling the matter until its next meeting.

“One of the biggest indicators of students having difficulty later in school is chronic absenteeism in early grades,” Adams told the board in asking for approval of Resolution 13-14-02. “Those patterns are established as early as preschool.”

Adams said she and Assistant Superintendent Dr. Michael Gardner met with Solano County District Attorney Donald A. du Bain to work on addressing truancy at the elementary school level. “He’s been very supportive of efforts to reduce truancy in our older students, and to cite parents who don’t get their kids to school,” she said. “So there’s that end of it, but more importantly there’s an educational end.”

But Trustee Peter Morgan had questions about enforcement of the resolution. “What resources are we going to put behind this, and what commitments are we going to actually make?” he asked.

Gardner explained that school officials have begun working in that direction. “We’ve increased the SARB process, the Student Attendance Review Board. We have a relationship with the Benicia Police Department, so our SARBs are now held at the Benicia Police Department,” Gardner said.

He also said that they have also moved the SARBs from once every two months to twice a month, and “Mr. du Bain has been very good at establishing a truancy court for both students and parents, the student one in Fairfield, the parent one in Vallejo, and actually pulling people into court. We talked to him today and asked him about the significance of that. In Benicia it’s been highly successful.”

He said Benicia’s attendance rate and SARB went from a little less than 70 percent to about 95 percent “because of being at the police station they take it a little more seriously. It’s making a difference, it’s not just a declaration, it’s a recognition that this is important to Benicia Unified.”

Morgan said he is very supportive of the effort. “I’m so supportive of it I think we should actually have a program behind it,” he said. “I hate to approve this and not think about it again for a year.”

He motioned to defer a decision on the resolution to a future meeting so that more information can be presented; the board voted unanimously to postpone a vote.

The next board meeting is scheduled for Sept. 5.

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