SIOUX FALLS, SD (Dakota News Now) — Now that children are returning to classrooms, the Sioux Falls School District must once again face one of its biggest challenges in recent years: simply getting kids to school.
“Chronic absenteeism” has increased nationwide in recent years. It is defined as missing 10 percent or more of school days due to absence for any reason.
In Sioux Falls, there were at least 17 days of absence last year, and about 17 percent of K-12 students reached that mark.
To reverse this trend, the Sioux Falls School District is doing two things Monday: It will launch a marketing campaign to raise awareness of the problem and it will hire liaisons to work in and with schools to make personal contact with children and their families who are having problems even when traveling to school.
“We need children to go to school so they can get an education,” Nold said. “We need people in our community to come and help people get there.”
“Show Up” is the name of the three-year marketing campaign that launched last Wednesday, one day before SFSD schools resumed classes.
The district held a press conference Monday morning to introduce the campaign in the building that houses both Click Rain and Lemonly — two local digital marketing firms that SFSD officials turned to for help producing the multimedia “Show Up” campaign.
“We can communicate a lot in the Sioux Falls School District. We can share information,” said DeeAnn Conrad, public relations coordinator for SFSD.
“But we’ve been doing this for years, and obviously we needed to do more than just educate families about the importance of schools. So we needed a robust strategy.”
Starting in May, four college summer interns from these two companies — with help from Casey Heitkamp, Click Rain’s assistant creative director — researched chronic absenteeism and developed graphics and marketing materials to demonstrate the severity of the problem.
“We wanted these students, these young adults, who are not so far removed from their own experience as students from preschool through 12th grade, but also not so far removed from their own experience as adults,” Conrad said. “They can see the value of showing up and being present.”
The cost of Click Rain and Lemonly’s help – not a dime – has saved the district a lot of money. The companies also save by having young interns do much of the work. Nold said there was initial skepticism because the research and design were in the hands of interns, but he and the district have been impressed with the results.
“People are always worried about our future. Our future is in incredible hands,” Nold said. “We have great kids out there, no question, and young adults doing great work. We have a very bright future, and there’s no doubt about it – we can foster that through the educational process.”
The “Show Up” graphics will appear on billboards throughout the city, on the district’s local television station (KRLN-TV), on the district’s website, in newsletters and on social media. Conrad said SFSD hopes to further increase the campaign’s visibility through future video messages.
All SFSD employees received a “Show Up” T-shirt – also designed by the interns – spreading the message. This shirt was sponsored by four of the district’s business partners.
“It’s really great to see the work being taken out into the world, and I hope it reaches a lot of people in the Sioux Falls community and we see an increase in participation,” said Joey Gellerman, Click Rain intern.
Gellerman, a Sioux Falls native, O’Gorman graduate and senior at the University of South Dakota, says the project is “close to his heart” and he hopes to work in marketing in his hometown after graduation.
“I’ve always loved Sioux Falls and the surrounding community here,” Gellerman said. “When I saw this on the future billboards and all these advertisements and saw how big an impact it will have on the success of future students, I thought it was very powerful and I hope we see success in the future based on this.”
The liaison program began last year. SFSD used a $1.5 million state education grant to invest in six liaisons — one for each school the district was targeting to increase attendance. Four other schools use part of their budgets to pay staff to focus on attendance “as part” of their broader work, Conrad confirmed. Those four liaisons, however, are not funded by that grant.
Keith Lapour is the new grant-funded liaison at Garfield Elementary, a school with a high proportion of low-income children. He had already worked there for six years as a behavioral therapist, so he already knew most of the students with learning disabilities.
One of his new tasks is to find out which children are consistently absent and why. The reasons for this are wide-ranging and vary from case to case, Lapour said. But he always came back to one word.
“For our families, transportation is problematic in many ways,” Lapour said. “If (parents) work nights and have a car that’s gone, and if they miss the bus, there’s no one to take them there.”
Some families are new to the city and don’t know their options. Some move from home to home, which causes confusion when they need to change buses. In many cases, this confusion is compounded by the language barrier. Garfield is one of the most culturally diverse schools in the city.
Occasionally, liaison officers visit families at home to find possible solutions.
“We can knock on doors,” Lapour said. “But we want to be respectful of the families. Every family has their own circumstances, but we try to build as many relationships as we can, and sometimes that means going out and visiting them, talking to them on their doorsteps and finding out what’s going on. ‘How can we help? What can we do to help your kids go to school?'”
One possibility is for carers to take the children along.
Lapour remembers a shy girl who came to him last year and said she was afraid she and her brother wouldn’t be able to make it to school for a 6 a.m. field trip the next day, but she clearly wanted to go on the trip.
“I just thought, ‘Oh my goodness, I’ll be there,’” Lapour said, his eyes shining.
“They didn’t have a ride to get there, but she actually started talking about wanting to be there with her class when they went on their field trip, and that was a real aha moment. We got there the next morning. She was waiting for us out there. It was kind of a very sweet thing, kind of a moving thing.”
However, liaisons who drive children to school are more of a last resort or an emergency service, Lapour said.
“We don’t want them to be taken away by us,” Lapour said. “(After) fifth grade, we want them to be independent and not dependent on us. We want them to develop habits and implement strategies… We want them to learn to be on their own.”
When the liaison program was introduced last year, all six schools with grant-funded liaisons saw a decline in absenteeism rates, and one school saw attendance increase for the first time in 15 years.
“Many of our families don’t have structure,” Lapour said. “When we find structure for them, participation seems to happen naturally.”
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