The Safety and Licensing Committee met 03/26/2025. The item that took up the most amount of time was the discussion on the resolution calling for the creation of a truancy ordinance in the city.
The resolution ended up being placed on hold until the 05/14/2025 Safety and Licensing Committee meeting. I have already recapped the discussion by the committee and Council members on the resolution, but I wanted to go back and recap the feedback that was provided by members of the public during the meeting.
I’ve prepared a transcript of their comments for download:
JACQUELINE was the parent of an Appleton Area School District student and a professional psychotherapist. She thought that before Appleton reinstated a truancy ordinance it should make sure that AASD had an appropriate ratio of school counselors to students and was meeting the needs of students through its existing programs. She noted that access to the PATH Program was limited. She took issue with the way AASD Superintendent Greg Hartjes had, during his presentation to the Common Council on truancy issues within AASD, likened a truancy citation to a traffic ticket, and told the committee, “This comparison is inadequate and shows a lack of understanding of the complex factors behind school attendance issues.” She opposed any effort to criminalize truancy.
AMANDA was the parent of an AASD student who was neurodivergent. Her daughter often missed classes due to burnout. Amanda herself had also often been truant when she was a student due to experiencing intense bullying. She shared stories from a number of people who wished to remain anonymous. One had to pull their child from AASD due bullying. One had been bullied themselves when they were a student. Three had children with anxiety issues and/or health problems. One had been truant when they were a child because they needed to take care of their parents.
EMILY had a daughter who had been truant due to mental health issues and being bullied. She found the process of interacting with the District about this issue had been negative. Additionally, she had children with autism that impacted their attendance. She was also a teacher and indicated that, as a teacher, her approach to truancy was to find out what the root cause was. She thought AASD should be looking at what was causing truancy before looking at creating a truancy ordinance. She felt that it should not be turned into a legal issue, saying, “I do not feel that this is an issue that requires any city input or county or law enforcement. This is a school district issue, and as you all are not teachers or social workers, you don’t know how this all works, and I don’t feel like your input is needed.”
GLORIA thought it was inappropriate to be putting students in a situation where they might face legal repercussions because that would be setting them up to have to interact with police officers for the rest of their lives. She said that she had been truant when she was in school because she had been abused at home and needed space to herself that was not programmed by others. “And if I had had adequate supports and adequate people checking on me, I maybe could have gotten help with the abuse at home instead. And that’s really what I’m looking for here is for people to understand that these are children first, and that they are people. They are whole people dealing with whole issues, and they deserve more than to be drug in front of some police officers.”
BEN believed that using punitive measures to combat truancy would harm poor families and would not address the underlying reasons for why students miss school but would instead create an adversarial relationship between students and AASD. He said he was neurodivergent and going to school had been difficult for him when he was a student. Additionally, a close friend of his had missed a lot of school because of her sever chronic depression. He told the committee, “We need to offer things to our kids that make them want to come to school.”
ROBERT said there were many complicated reasons that caused students to be absent from class, “And by using the criminal justice system to investigate students and parents, at best, we’re introducing unnecessary stressors into the lives of our students and families which will interfere with the academic process for the student, and at worst, it can lead to students and their families ending up incarcerated with criminal records that could follow their families indefinitely, limiting their economic opportunities, which can make an already rough home life even worse.”
TIANA was the parent of three AASD students one of whom would be considered habitually truant. He was autistic and was only protected because of his IEP process. She worried about what would happen to students who had problems but whose parents did not go through the process of getting them diagnosed or getting them IEPs. She also said that she herself had been considered habitually truant because she had been taken a lot of classes and also working part time. She wondered, “Is there some way to incorporate more of a Montessori method where they are brought into having a purpose at school, having a job, having the ability to support other students? Kids who teach other kids tend to be more engaged in the process.”
RONNA SWIFT, who was a member of the truancy task force, thought that school districts did not have enough funding and did not have enough money to hire additional psychologists, counselors, and social workers. She was concerned about how ticketing students under the age of 18 would impact them after they became adults. Would they have a record that was posted publicly? Would they have bill collectors sent after them? She wanted to know if it would be possible to rescind a ticket if the student took appropriate corrective action. Would counseling be available to students if appropriate? She used to teach at Oshkosh Correctional and felt that some of those students had ended up there because the system didn’t have good supports in place.
CAROL did not think schools were adequately funded and were not meeting the needs of students. If schools were funded properly, she did not think they would need to be talking about reinstating a truancy ordinance.
SCOTT KORNISH (who is listed as the Youth and Family Services Manager for the Outagamie County Department of Health and Human Services) suggested that people wait and give time for the County, AASD, the police, and city representatives to get together and talk about the issue and figure out what they wanted to do before making a final decision on the resolution. There was already a meeting scheduled to take place in the middle of April. He said that the examples of truant students that had been given at the meeting that evening did not sound like students who should be fined. “I do believe the school does a good job. We can always do better at trying to identify those underlying needs, what needs to be done, how do we support those students.”
View full meeting details and video here: https://cityofappleton.legistar.com/MeetingDetail.aspx?ID=1281678&GUID=DB3E08F6-2585-49BF-AC3B-77607BB208B8
Be the first to reply