Date of Award
2004
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Education
Department
Fischler Graduate School of Education and Human Services
Advisor
Raymond S. Froling
Committee Member
Charles J. Greco
Committee Member
Maryellen Maher
Keywords
attendance, extracurricular activities, Grades 9-12, high schools, intervention programs, Monroe County, New York City, ninth-grade students, parent involvement, peer tutoring, Pennsylvania, Pocono Mountain East High School, Pocono Mountain School District, Pocono Mountain West High School, Pocono Mountain, rural school districts, school attendance, student support services, truancy, truancy citations, urban commuting, youth intervention programs
Abstract
This applied dissertation was designed to provide an intervention program to reduce the incidents of truancy among students in the Pocono Mountain West High School in the Pocono Mountain School District, which is comprised of eight municipalities in Monroe County in Northeastern Pennsylvania. The school district covers 317.7 square miles and serves a population of approximately 51,000. It is a predominately rural school district in the center of the Pocono Mountain resort and recreation area within commuting distance to major urban areas, especially New York City.
The district had a single high school building and campus prior to completion of a second building that opened for the 2002 fall semester. At that time, the student body and faculty was divided into two and assigned to both the former building, newly renamed as Pocono Mountain East High School, and the new building that was named the Pocono Mountain West High School.
In the 2001-2002 school year, before being divided into two schools, 309 truancy citations were issued to students in Grades 9-12. During the fall semester of the 2002-2003 school year, 269 truancy citations were issued to students in Grades 9-12 at the newly opened Pocono Mountain West High School with 74 of these truancy citations issued to ninth-grade students.
An intervention program was designed and implemented to provide parents with a support system and resources to aid them in getting their children to attend school regularly, to provide students with academic peer tutoring support, to engage students in at least one extracurricular activity, and to have students meet monthly with two different agency resource officers to discuss attendance concerns and/or difficulties they were experiencing. The participants in the intervention program were 34 of the 40 ninth-grade students who had received the 74 truancy citations in the 2002 fall semester, and the program was conducted during the 2003 fall semester.
The intervention included subjective and objective assessments. Using the data collected, the writer assessed and described the effects of the intervention program to reduce the incidents of student truancy. The intervention program resulted in a reduction in the number of truancy citations issued from 62 to only 7 for the 34 students in the target group.