The Little Gadget That Boosts Attendance
Hari Sreenivasan is a CBS News correspondent based in Dallas.
The way my parents put it to me when I was a kid: going to school was my job.
They put a roof over my head, put all the food I needed in my stomach, gave me clothes, protected me from wild animals and so forth. In return, I was supposed to do my best in every class, every year, no questions asked. For a whole host of reasons, that isn't the environment that many children grow up in around the country.
Whether it be due to peer pressure, lack of role models, absent parents, etc., there are a startling number of dropouts all around the country. Colin Powell's organization, America's Promise, produced a report recently, which painted a rather bleak picture of the dropout rate across the largest 50 school districts or zones in the country. In Dallas, which has one of the worst dropout rates in the country, one school; Bryan Adams (and no it is not named after the singer), has been trying an innovative idea blending technology and support that is producing some amazing results.
Last year a judge here enrolled some habitual truants, meaning students with not just bad but horrible attendance, into a trial program where they are required to wear a GPS device that tracks their movements to and from school. Every morning before the bell rings, truancy counselors check a computer that displays the location and speed of all the students every few minutes on a map. This way, they know if the student is making it to class, whether they are walking slowly or getting a lift. The judge also ordered a 9 p.m. curfew for these kids, which is monitored by a voice-recognition system – meaning a computer calls the home phone, and the kids have to be there to answer it. If they aren't they have a few minutes to call back and say why they didn't pick up the phone.
(CBS)
They put a roof over my head, put all the food I needed in my stomach, gave me clothes, protected me from wild animals and so forth. In return, I was supposed to do my best in every class, every year, no questions asked. For a whole host of reasons, that isn't the environment that many children grow up in around the country.
Whether it be due to peer pressure, lack of role models, absent parents, etc., there are a startling number of dropouts all around the country. Colin Powell's organization, America's Promise, produced a report recently, which painted a rather bleak picture of the dropout rate across the largest 50 school districts or zones in the country. In Dallas, which has one of the worst dropout rates in the country, one school; Bryan Adams (and no it is not named after the singer), has been trying an innovative idea blending technology and support that is producing some amazing results.
Last year a judge here enrolled some habitual truants, meaning students with not just bad but horrible attendance, into a trial program where they are required to wear a GPS device that tracks their movements to and from school. Every morning before the bell rings, truancy counselors check a computer that displays the location and speed of all the students every few minutes on a map. This way, they know if the student is making it to class, whether they are walking slowly or getting a lift. The judge also ordered a 9 p.m. curfew for these kids, which is monitored by a voice-recognition system – meaning a computer calls the home phone, and the kids have to be there to answer it. If they aren't they have a few minutes to call back and say why they didn't pick up the phone.
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