Cypress School District*

The web site of the Cypress School District provides an inadequate treatment of Instruction/Student Services attendance matters and lacks explicit expectations for student attendance. Lenette Brown The Cypress School District web site will be reviewed, with modifications made as Food Services appropriate, prior to October 30, 2004, incorporating information and Board policies related to attendance and expectations related to student attendance. Principals 8. In 2002/03 only ten of the 27 school districts were represented on the County (Department of Education) SAR Board. Membership in the county SAR Board is M.J. Beatty open to all county school districts and all school districts - even those without Mark Brown Carol Erbe SAR Boards would benefit by their participation. Denine Kelly Donna Layne The Cypress School District, as a K-6 District of approximately 4700 children, has three Jeannette Lohrman Sunghie Park Okino certificated administrators at District office. These include the Superintendent, Assistant Jane Ann Snyder Stephen P. Teschke, Ed.D. Daniel J. Thomas, Ed.D. Response to Study of Truancy in Orange County Schools Page Two July 27, 2004 Superintendent, Human Resources/Instruction, and the Director, Instruction/Student Services. Adequate administrative time is not available, with this limited personnel, to attend regularly scheduled SAR Board meetings at the county office. However, the Superintendent will make every effort to have administrative personnel attend SAR Board meetings as time permits.

Cypress School District does not declare any of their truants to be habitual truants. Failure to identify as habitual truants those students who have been truant for three or more times during the school year appears to place districts out of compliance with the state education code. For the 2004/05 school year, the District will utilize a feature offered to its clients by the San Diego County Office of Education Student Information System (SIS). Students will be tracked at their individual school sites and, when multiple tardies or unexcused absences are noted by the system, a letter will be sent to parents/guardians identifying their student as having attendance issues. It will be noted that truant behavior will be referred to a Student Study Team (SST) requiring parent participation in the development of strategies to remediate attendance behaviors. At the elementary level, it is most often the lack of parent support for student attendance at school, not the lack of student will to attend, that is the problem. "Habitual truants" will be referred to District office for the potential convening of a local SAR Board to deal with truant behavior. I would note that in my 32 years as an educator, your report effectively finds what we as practitioners have experienced in attempting to have the district attorney's office prosecute the parents of chronically truant offenders. The district attorney's office is not manned at an appropriate level to facilitate the prosecution of caseloads throughout the county, which may number in the hundreds. The result is that the strategies, threats of referral and ultimate referral to the district attorney's office, are only so much "smoke and mirrors," as only a handful of these cases ever come to the imposition of penalties and even fewer result in a change of student behavior.

School districts that limit or curtail their participation on the county SAR Board because of budgetary constraints may not be aware of the opportunity for reimbursement through state or federal funding, afforded by Education Code Section 48323. School districts in Orange County and throughout the state have received no mandated cost reimbursement for either the 2003/04 school year or projected for the 2004/05 school year. The District, in 2003/04, had an estimated mandated reimbursement cost claim of $183,000. Until mandated cost reimbursements are fully funded, there are no available district general funds to support personnel attendance at SAR Board meetings. Unfunded Response to Study of Truancy in Orange County Schools Page Three July 27, 2004 mandates, in essence, become a "general fund encroachment" and the state has issued an IOU to districts submitting mandated cost claims, with the prospect that the IOU will never be paid.