OPPORTUNITY KNOCKING: Truancy officers see success in getting APS students back to school

AURORA | It’s no secret that teachers, students and district leaders often celebrate the plethora of immigrants and refugees in the Aurora Public Schools district. But the district’s students, including many learning English and living in poverty, can face some serious challenges in their academic careers.

First and foremost: getting to school, and staying there.

APS is beginning to see the results of a years-long push to get students in class by building bridges with students’ families – often by working outside of school – and making it harder for students to slip through the cracks.

Since 2016, the district has tackled the issue of high student truancy in five northwest Aurora schools peppering some of the city’s most impoverished neighborhoods.

That school year, only about three-quarters of the 2,200-student population was present on given day at Aurora Central High School – compared with about 93 percent in the rest of the state.  

Uriel Andrade, 15, arrived at Aurora Central from Mexico at the tail-end of the next school year.

Uriel, with black cropped hair and a bashful smile, said he didn’t go to class often until a few months ago. Instead, he’d ditch class after his first one of the day to go hang out with friends in northwest Aurora’s parks. Beyond that, he wouldn’t say what he was up to – only that he’d fallen in with a group of students who weren’t interested in school.

With his mother working long hours as a house cleaner, and his step-father building roofs, Uriel was largely on his own during the day.

So Aurora Central’s Dean of Attendance, Davian Torres, called his mom.

Gabriela Valdez picked up the phone, listened, and was quickly disappointed with her son. But she said she was heartened by Torres’ plan to keep Uriel in class: Uriel would sign a sign-in sheet at every class, which Gabriela would review every night and Torres would check for forged signatures.

Torres would also visit Andrade’s small apartment near the intersection of East Alameda Avenue and South Havana Street to give Gabriela updates on Uriel’s academic progress, as well. Or, he’d call and invite her to visit Central when she had the time.

The plan worked, said Uriel and his mother. School staff say he’s back in school, and back on track.

Many children in northwest Aurora don’t go to school for a wide range of reasons. Here, 82 percent of students receive free- and reduced-priced lunches, a marker of poverty, compared with about 70 percent in the rest of the district. More students are also learning English here compared with the rest of APS. These schools also include many refugee families who fled violence or political turmoil across the world.

Aurora Central staff say they find students and families in mental health or financial crises, or students who work late at night to support their families and struggle to get up on time for early classes.

Often, though, students just need a little bit of direction from a mentor they trust.

So Torres and other staff in northwest Aurora, including teachers, visit families’ homes when it’s convenient, sit on their couches and learn about the challenges in their students’ lives. In fact, they’ve done so hundreds of times this year already.

In the 2015-2016 school year – the first year Central staff began tracking their visits to homes – staff kept 34 appointments with families. But in the 2017-2018 school year, staff made 840 home visits, and they’ve already made over 700 this year.

From 2016-2017 to this year, attendance rates increased from 77 percent to 85 percent.

Central’s home visit and outreach experiment has also been mimicked to a lesser extent in four other northwest Aurora schools: Paris Elementary, Crawford Elementary, Aurora West College Preparatory Academy and Boston P-8 schools.

With Central, these five schools make up APS’s ACTION Zone, a group of geographically- and demographically-similar schools experimenting with some reforms and projects like home visits to boost student success.

Earlier this month, Torres shook hands and joked with students during a passing period in a crowded Aurora Central hall earlier this month. He’s a popular staffer there, and mostly spends his days meeting with parents at the school or in their homes to listen and tell them how school works.

It’s no small job in neighborhoods where immigrant parents may not know how grades or class periods work, said Paloma Hernandez, Central’s Family Liaison.

Staff there all work together to check in on students. For more serious cases, staff there will track down students and refer them to counselors, mentors or mental health professionals if need be.

Hernandez said the plan is working. Better yet, the vast majority of parents that Central staff work with are incredibly engaged in their children’s future once they have the right tools to do so, she said. Students start coming to school and learning while they are there.

She credits Torres’ tireless work meeting with parents for the progress seen at Central.

“This man, many times, doesn’t eat lunch,” she said, gesturing to Torres, “because we’re focusing on each student.”