10
S moke S ignals
OCTOBER 1, 2017
'Improving attendance is a no-brainer'
EDUCATION continued
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American students throughout the
state. One-third of Tribal students
were chronically absent in 2011-12,
with the highest rate – 43 percent
– at the high school level.
Students who miss that much
school, especially at the elementary
level, are unlikely to ever read or
do math at grade level or earn a
diploma, educational studies have
shown.
The state Department of Edu-
cation started a new program, the
Tribal Attendance Pilot Project,
which targeted 17 Oregon schools,
including Willamina Elementary,
to address the problem among
Native American students. Ap-
proximately a third of Willamina
students are Native American and
most of those are Grand Ronde
Tribal members or descendants.
The Oregon Legislature allotted
$1.5 million and the state Depart-
ment of Education distributed that
money to nine school districts that
serve students who are enrolled in
a Tribe with each district receiv-
ing $150,000 each for the 2016-17
school year. Those school districts
also are receiving the same amount
of money to be used during this
school year and in 2018-19.
At the participating schools, the
project paid the salary of new staff
members, called family advocates,
to work specifically on Native
American student attendance. The
program concentrates on third-
grade students, Department of
Education Indian Education Spe-
cialist Ramona Holcomb said.
She told The Oregonian that the
pilot project is seen as working
and will continue because it “can-
not solve chronic absenteeism in
“Chronic absenteeism isn’t bound to
ethnicity. It’s not bound to American
Indians. It crosses the spectrum.”
~ Leslie Riggs, Education manager
Graphic created by George Valdez
a year.” Its successes include the
“simple act of (schools) being more
welcoming” to Native families and
raising awareness of the impor-
tance of good attendance.
In Willamina, the school district
hired Rebecca Arredondo as the
Tribal Attendance Family Advocate
and the school district, supported
by the Tribal Education Depart-
ment, started holding monthly
Attendance Reward Nights where
students who missed one day of
school or less in a month were
invited to attend and possibly win
raffle prizes.
Willamina School District Super-
intendent Carrie Zimbrick said the
district collaborated with the Tribe
on the effort from the beginning,
including Education Department
Manager Leslie Riggs and other
Tribal Education employees in
creating the job description, con-
ducting job interviews and selecting
the family advocate.
“I would say, for Rebecca, family
outreach has always been a passion
of hers even as a classroom teacher
at Willamina Elementary,” Zim-
brick said. “So when this position
came about, she got really excited
and came and talked to me about
applying and leaving the classroom
to do this work.”
Zimbrick said talking about
chronic absenteeism with families
and students, as well as working
with families to support them in
getting their children to school are
some of the things that are positive-
ly affecting the absenteeism rate
in Willamina. She said Arredondo
has purchased alarm clocks and
gas cards for families and provided
transportation to get chronically
absent children to school.
“I really like the fact that she is
going to the families, too,” Zimbrick
said. “The expectation wasn’t that
you have to come to the school to
participate. I think that was super
important.”
“I think the best thing about what
our TAPP does is when we hired
the individual who was going to be
the family advocate at the school,
myself and Audra Sherwood sat
on the hiring panel so we had a lot
of say about who that person was
going to be,” Riggs said. “The last
thing that we wanted to happen
was for somebody to come in and
try and hammer everything that
looked like a nail.”
Riggs agreed with Zimbrick that
Arredondo’s outreach to Native
families and listening skills have
created a more welcoming envi-
ronment.
“She spoke to our community
members as human beings and
was able to then start to develop
relationships with folks in the com-
munity,” Riggs said.
Riggs said Tribal Education De-
partment staff also worked closely
with Arredondo to communicate
concerns about individual Native
youths experiencing attendance
issues.
“It was easier then to understand
what the extenuating circum-
stances were for the kids and the
families, and why they weren’t
getting to school and taking a look
at those issues as opposed to once
again putting it into a punitive or
a top-down model where it was an
office coming into the home and
telling them what they needed to
do,” he said.
Riggs said discovering why a stu-
dent is having a particular problem
getting to school regularly and ad-
dressing the family’s specific issue
is why Willamina has experienced
marked improvement in its Native
American absenteeism rates. “We
made a surgical effort as opposed
to just casting a wide net,” he said.
The effort within the Willamina
School District to get Native Amer-
ican students to school appears
to be having a spillover effect.
Chronic absenteeism rates for other
students also dropped in all three
schools, most notably at the middle
school where the rate plummeted
from 50.51 percent to 33.33 percent.
Zimbrick said that although Arre-
dondo concentrates on elementary
school students, trying to instill
a tradition of regularly going to
school in youth, the district also
found funds to expand its efforts
by designating another employee to
work with middle and high school
students.
“A lot of our efforts at school itself
were universal regardless of being
Native or non-Native,” Zimbrick
said. “Improving attendance is a
no-brainer that is going to help
impact dropout rates. We’ve found
ways to fund another position.”
Halcomb, however, cautions
against reading too much into first-
year statistics. For example, she
said Pendleton’s Washington Ele-
mentary School had 349 students
in third grade in 2015-16 and 513
students in 2016-17, and the dis-
trict only has one family advocate
for all of those students.
In addition, Jefferson County
had 49 inches of snow in January.
Before the bad weather, its schools
were showing a downward trend for
chronic absenteeism.
Zimbrick said she and Halcomb
participated in a national webinar
on Sept. 12 called “Portraits of
Change” and presented on how Ore-
gon is tackling the Native American
chronic absenteeism problem. The
state Department of Education
selected the Willamina School Dis-
trict to represent Oregon’s efforts.
“It was pretty cool,” Zimbrick
said. “I am just really grateful and
thankful that this is an initiative
that the state is recognizing as an
important piece of the education
puzzle and addressing chronic
absenteeism is something that we
all need to pay attention to. If we
find a model that works, we need to
continue to support it.”
“I know one of the things that
Willamina is doing is that it became
very apparent to them that they
have an issue there,” Riggs said.
“Starting with the elementary kids
was a really good idea because we
need to create those habits. … They
are recognizing the fact that this is
an issue. Chronic absenteeism isn’t
bound to ethnicity. It’s not bound
to American Indians. It crosses the
spectrum.”