Tardiness is down significantly in School District U-46 this year, however truancy is up, according to a report by district officials.

The number of students arriving late to class is down by 50 percent, while truancy numbers are at 278, 71 more students than this time last year.

“This year we are starting at a higher number, if we don’t change anything we will end in a higher place,” said John Heiderscheidt, coordinator of school district safety.

The report focuses on students in the district’s eight middle schools and five high schools, totaling about 17,000 students.

Last year at this time 207 students were considered truant, and by the end of the year 2,380 students, or 14 percent of the student population at the middle and high schools, were truant.

Officials fear if the current trend continues, year-end numbers for the 2011-12 school year will be much higher.

“We are trending in the wrong direction,” Heiderscheidt said.

In middle school a student is considered truant after missing three days with no parent phone call. At the high school level a student is truant after five days of missing school with no parent phone call.

Though school officials make phone calls to the parents each day a student is absent and unaccounted for, more often than not in a truancy situation, they do not reach a parent or receive a valid explanation for the student’s absence, Heiderscheidt said.

Though students may encounter class failures due to excessive absences, they are always welcomed back, he said.

“Those failures really slows down their futures,” Heidersheidt said. “We want to help them so that they are graduating from their high school and not watching their friends graduate.”

Greg Walker, assistant superintendent of secondary education, said the district is working to identify an action plan for truancy by asking school leaders to “think deeply about what is present and what we could redirect.”

“What is missing that we could provide?” Walker said. “We are asking schools to be thoughtful in this matter.”

The district is trying to look deeper at community partnerships, such as working more closely with the police department and social service agencies to reverse the trend. They question whether some adult behaviors are negatively affecting students’ decisions to come to school.

School Board member Joyce Fountain, who also is a professor at Elgin Community College, wonders if students’ absences in the middle and high schools could be similar to reasons she hears at ECC. Students tell her they cannot come to school because they have to watch a younger sibling or have no transportation.

Some students may also have to work to help support the family, instead of coming to school, officials speculated.

Jerry Cook, principal at Elgin High School, where there are just over 2,300 students, said they take a proactive approach to dealing with truancy.

Though there are 101 students classified as truant at the school, attendance is actually higher this year than last, Cook said.

School officials meet with students as soon as they come “under the radar” of being truant and meet with parents to ask what they can do to help keep their child in school.

They explain how truancy is affecting their academic performance. Families are offered counseling, in and outside of the school setting, to address the root cause of why students are avoiding school, he said.

Typically students who are having a difficult time academically fall into truancy as they approach the legal drop-out age of 17, Cook said.

“At that point we are doing almost triage to figure out what we can do to get them back on track, and help them pass classes and make better decisions not to drop out,” he said.

The district has changed the way it monitors truancy, which used to be an automated system, he said. Now the school assigns an adult to check in on students, who are edging on truancy, throughout the day. The students are regularly monitored and rated on their attendance and behavior. This way it is easier to identify a student in need of more intensive intervention before it is too late, he added.

“(We) identify students ahead of time and try to give them interventions needed to keep them on track and successful,” Cook said.

There is no specific number of absences or age where the school gives up on a student, Cook said.

“That is what we try to fight against,” Cook said. “We don’t want to be the ones to give up on them.”