AIM Attendance Improvement Management

Kenton Fiscal Court agreed Tuesday to split the cost of the $160,000 Attendance Improvement Management Program with Covington Independent Public Schools. The money would come out of the county’s mental health reserves.

County officials approved the program on a trial basis, with no guarantees of future funding.

“I don’t like to spend money. You know that,” Commissioner Sara Reeder Voelker said. “But when it’s education, I say, ‘Give it a try for a year.’” Superintendent Lynda Jackson has already discussed the program with the school board, and she said that she will present it to the board for a vote Thursday.

Initially, the one-year pilot program would track about 125 high school students who are court ordered to attend school.

The program is aimed at reducing Holmes High School’s high absentee rate, improving truant students’ grade-point averages, and keeping habitual truants out of the regional juvenile detention facility where they cost taxpayers money, school and county officials said. While ankle monitoring bracelets are often used to monitor juveniles who are ordered by a court to attend school, the hand-held devices don’t carry the same stigma, supporters said.

“What (Jackson’s) decided to do is to find a way to keep those kids in school and focused on learning,” Kenton County Deputy Judge-executive Scott Kimmich said.

If the school board gives its approval, the program “would probably start in mid-to-late October, or whenever any (Holmes’) students are court-ordered to attend school,” Jackson said.

Holmes High School has a 90.6 percent attendance rate, while the state average for high schools is 94 percent, Kimmich said.

Like all public school districts, Covington Independent Public Schools receives money based on average daily attendance. During the school year that just ended, the system lost $1.1 million in state revenue because of absenteeism, Jackson said.

The AIM truancy diversion program – which offers coaching, technology and real-time intervention – has been successful in urban school districts in San Antonio, Dallas and other Texas cities Jackson said. Participating students are assigned “coaches” who monitor their attendance and call them at home in the evenings three times a week to see how school is going.

“In the morning, a student receives a wake-up call and has to punch in a code number to show that he or she is up,” Jackson said. The student punches in other codes upon arriving and leaving school.

“The attendance clerk and administrators know who has these GPS tracking devices,” Jackson said. “So if the child is not in school, AIM locates and calls the student and reports its findings to the school.

In areas where the AIM program’s been used, studies have shown students who were court-ordered to attend school had a 97 percent attendance rate one month after completing the program, Jackson said.

Kenton District Judge Ken Easterling, a former juvenile prosecutor, praised the Covington school system for its efforts to get students to school.