The Safety and Licensing Committee met 06/11/2025. The committee spent nearly 40 minutes receiving and discussing an update from the Appleton Area School District regarding the initiative to bring back an anti-truancy ordinance in the City of Appleton.
AASD Superintendent Greg Hartjes as well as several staff members reviewed how the District currently work with students who have attendance issues and briefly touched on the situations in which they believed being able to issue a truancy citation would be beneficial.
I’ve prepared a transcript of the discussion for download:
Superintendent Hartjes had previously given an overview of AASD’s reasoning for asking for a truancy ordinance back in March at a Common Council meeting. During that presentation he had talked about the District’s current three-tier support system for students with attendance issues, but he felt that they had used a lot of educational jargon, so he wanted to go over that again in a more simplified way.
AASD provided the committee with a flow chart outlining their process of working with students and families with attendance issues. It does, to some degree, speak for itself and lays out the process of interacting with students when they and their families respond to outreach efforts and also details the process when a student and family is not responsive. Superintendent Hartjes told the committee that 80% of students are successfully handled with universal supports, 20% of students needed additional tier 2 supports, and 5% ended up needing more intensive tier 3 supports.
Ultimately, AASD representatives indicated that they believed that a truancy ordinance would be a beneficial tool to have as one of the last options available to respond to the approximately 30 students who were most chronically absent and unresponsive to other efforts.
Superintendent Hartjes reviewed some of the other ways they have responded to students with attendance issues. These include:
- AASD purchased two vans so that staff members could pick up students, bring them to school, possibly shuttle them to appointments, and return them home at the end of the day. “And that’s been really successful, but that’s a small piece, right? We only have two vans, and right now we need staff members to drive them, but it’s been successful.”
- They are looking into running a second, late school bus this upcoming school year around 10AM so that students who miss the first part of the day will still be able to attend for some part of the day. “Better to have a student in school for five and a half hours then not at all. So those are some of the ideas that we’re working on. But transportation obviously comes with a lot of cost to it.”
- They are trying to make their educational content more interesting and engaging to students. “[W]e never really thought about maybe some kids aren’t even coming to school at all because they aren’t finding it engaging, relevant, interesting. So that’s something that we are working on internally, and really that doesn’t cost us any money.”
- They hired a second attendance coordinator to focus on attendance at the elementary level. “We’re the only school district in the state of Wisconsin that has two full time social workers that focus 100% of their time on attendance.”
In addition to all of that, they would like to have Appleton institute a truancy ordinance to help them deal with the approximately 30 students who do not respond in any way to staff’s efforts to reach out.
They provided one example of a student whose attendance improved without the aid of a truancy ordinance. This student had been dealing with significant anxiety and mental health concerns. AASD made a truancy referral to Outagamie County for additional supports. The county set up a therapist for the student that the family, based on their culture, felt comfortable with. The student began her Junior year but was not attending school, so a school social worker, school counselor, alternative education teacher, associated principal, dean of students, and an attendance coordinator developed a plan to get her into school for just a portion of the day. In January of her junior year she started attending one alternative education class that had only 10 other students. As she began more comfortable, she started attending for longer and longer periods of time. She ended up attending enough that she became eligible for alternative programing through the Central program. When she got into Central she worked through the GED Option 2 program and ended up graduating on time with her class.
They provided two other examples of students who are helped without a truancy ordinance. Those students include:
- Students hospitalized in an adolescent unit because they have had thoughts of suicide or attempted suicide.
- Students with mental illness who are participating in a partial hospitalization program and have been discharged but don’t want to return to school.
Essentially, AASD staff worked to find out stressors and make efforts to ease students back in to attending full time classes.
AASD staff also works with students who don’t have reliable transportation at home or who miss their transportation not only via the two vans the District purchased or the late bus that is planned to run in the 2025-2026 school year but in more basic ways like teaching students how to access the Valley Transit bus that runs to North and working with Valley Transit to find good pick-up spots for students.
AASD social workers also work with parents who struggle to get their teenagers to attend school. When the student is not going to school due to things like autism and mental illness, social workers will try to educate parents on available community resources.
AASD offers multiple programs identified by acronyms such as STAR, TRAC, and PATH. Safety and Licensing Committee Chairperson Chris Croatt (District 14) asked AASD to put together a supplemental document explaining what the programs were.
The Safety and Licensing Committee members seemed to appreciate the presentation. Alderperson Sheri Hartzheim (District 13) felt it would help increase community support for reimplementing a truancy ordinance since it demonstrated all the other things AASD was doing before ever getting to the point of needing to issue a truancy citation.
There was a question about how an Appleton truancy ordinance would work with a truancy referral to the county. AASD Attendance Coordinator Stephanie Marta told the committee that AASD would typically not do both things at the same time. They would probably try to county truancy referral first and only ask for a truancy citation to be issued if the student and family were unresponsive to county services.
In terms of next steps, Alderperson Croatt indicated that AASD and the city would continue to dialog, that Superintendent Hartjes would be working with various stakeholders to schedule a meeting in July or early August, and that Alderperson Croatt anticipated bringing back the resolution to implement a new truancy ordinance in Appleton to the committee as an action item in August.
View full meeting details and video here: https://cityofappleton.legistar.com/MeetingDetail.aspx?ID=1284219&GUID=3F83EB61-2EA7-4B30-9BD1-71F96C71B882
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