Newsroom
Strategic focus on student attendance helps combat school dropout crisis
 The Riverside County Office of Education and three other county agencies have launched a major strategic focus to combat the school dropout crisis and a wide range of related problems.
Riverside County Superintendent of Schools Kenneth M. Young, District Attorney Rod Pacheco and Sheriff-Coroner Stanley Sniff have aligned their agency’s forces to focus on this joint initiative together. The county’s Department of Public Social Services is also playing a key role in the effort.
Cami Berry, Director of the Safe Schools Unit at RCOE, and one of the coordinators of this initiative, emphasized the importance of the agencies working together to combat truancy as a leading factor in student dropouts. "That's one of our big goals this year: to get the right people at the table sorting out what's going on."
The cooperating agencies will throw a coordinated array of resources at combating the dropout phenomenon including truancy sweeps, anti-gang and safe-schools projects, student assistance efforts, parent counseling, district intervention, probation work and prosecution: All these tools and more will be employed together.
The coordinated effort will function under the umbrella of the state’s School Attendance Review Board law, which was created to solve student attendance and behavior problems.
The California Department of Education recently released new figures showing that approximately 24 percent of California students drop out of school. Those numbers reflect new survey tools that for the first time have yielded a detailed picture of the problem, including fresh data about related issues. The coordinating agencies plan to take advantage of that new data with their initiative.
“Our work force today has changed,” said Riverside County Superintendent of Schools Kenneth M. Young, addressing the group’s first meeting Monday (August 4). “For students that drop out, or who graduate without any kind of career technical education skills or without a post secondary pathway – there is very little opportunity in today’s work force. We have to keep all students engaged in school,” he said. “We have to help teachers and parents stay connected to their students. Otherwise, we are going to lose a whole generation of kids.”
For information contact:
Rick Peoples,
Public Information Officer
Telephone: (951) 826-6642
Fax: (951) 826-6199
rpeoples@rcoe.us
|
