About Val Verde USD
The Val Verde Unified School District in Riverside County, California is proud to serve our diverse population of about 20,000 K-12 students in the cities of Perris, Moreno Valley, and Riverside.
Our SARB program has been able to successfully combat chronic absenteeism with a team of five Teachers On Special Assignment (TOSA). VVUSD focuses on a prevention system to maximize student achievement by utilizing Student Attendance Review Team (SART) and Student Attendance Review Board (SARB) meetings. Generally, our meetings are conducted based on the number of absences students reach at a given point in the year. Our SART meetings are held at 5 absences in semester 1 and at 9 absences in semester 2. These meetings are always held by our TOSAs on a one-on-one basis with the parent. At the elementary level, we hold the meetings at the student services office, and at the secondary level, we hold meetings on-site and include the student. During this meeting, we can identify the barriers to attendance early and provide the family with the necessary resources. These meetings are tailored to the needs of each individual family. There is no one size fits all. Fortunately, this initial meeting often leads to an improvement in student attendance and achievement.
Our panel typically consists of all the TOSAs, our CWA Director, a district nurse, a mental health representative, an attendance technician, as well as our District attorney, and a member from the family justice center. With the support of our District attorney, we can provide the family with even more resources to improve student attendance before they are referred to mediation.
Despite our strong efforts, we continue to face challenges as a team; our main one stemming from a lack of participation from some parents. We shift our focus during these instances and push even harder. In teams, we visit the homes of families who we haven’t been able to contact and speak to them at their door. We make sure to personally contact each parent so that our students don’t slip through the cracks.
As a district, our SARB program has focused the last 11 years on Chronic Absenteeism. We have been the proud recipients of Model SARB 4 times, and we have reached a District-wide attendance rate of 96.7% without a district-wide transportation system.
We continue to work as a team to reflect on our practices each year and adjust as needed to ensure student success! We are happy to work alongside other districts to both teach and learn new methods to improve attendance.
The Val Verde Unified School District team is happy to share their best practices and success strategies with your district. View their presentation at https://vimeo.com/661781242 and feel free to reach out to Maddy at the below information for more detail.
Check out their press release at https://www.yahoo.com/now/val-verde-unified-school-district-173000107.html.
