School District, City Hall Talking About Truancy

Add comment April 10th, 2008

The Rockford School District is working with Rockford Mayor Larry Morrissey’s administration on a plan to give the administration unfettered “real time” access to the school district’s truancy data.

The school district and city have for months been at loggerheads over the matter, so the fact that they’re now working together appears to represent significant progress toward a resolution.

First, some background from the Register Star:

Under existing law, students caught skipping class in Rockford are referred to an intervention plan run by the School District. The schools refer students to the city only when they’re truant more than four times.

Rockford ordinance prohibits even a single instance of truancy, but city officials can’t issue citations to students when they don’t have their names.

And this:

(City Legal Director Patrick) Hayes said the city doesn’t necessarily want to prosecute every truant. Rather, he said, city officials need the additional information to more effectively craft and execute a citywide anti-truancy policy.

And this:

Morrissey is frustrated by what he views as the School District’s slow pace in sharing information about truants. In the first five months of this school year, the city issued 400 fewer citations than during the same period last year.

But rectifying this discrepancy is no simple affair. The city must navigate a federal privacy law limiting the student information that schools may share and a state law describing protocol for truancy intervention.

The federal privacy law at issue is FERPA. More background here. The basic idea is that the law restricts the information concerning students which a school district may share, even with other government bodies.

In response to inquiries from the city as well as other Illinois officials, the U.S. Department of Education last fall offered its view on how to reconcile conflicts between FERPA and state law and city ordinance. An August letter is here and an October letter is here.

The city wants “real time” access to the school district’s truancy information, as Hayes put it. But as the school district reads FERPA, together with city ordinance and the state law enabling that ordinance, the city is not entitled to all of the school district’s truancy information. Instead, the school district shares the names of truant students only after students are truant more than four times.

So the city wants to change state law in order to make clear that it is entitled to the get all the truancy information it wants — when it wants it. Only, until now, the city and school district weren’t having much in the way of constructive communication concerning the matter.

When I talked to school district general counsel Stephen Katz for a story published in early April (linked above), he said he wasn’t aware of the city discussing its plan with any school district official. The city retorted that it had notified the school district in a resolution it provided in early spring. In crafting that story, I acted as much as a mediator between two adversaries as a reporter.

But this morning, Katz said this in an e-mail:

Assistant City Attorney Giliberti and I have prepared legislation that has been submitted to the US Department of Education for their input.

I asked him whether the proposal was consistent with what Hayes had described to me, which I had reported. He responded:

Not exactly what you reported. You reported that the amendment would address the “law enforcement” so-called exception to FERPA. Not so. It is (an) amendment of the enabling act which allowed municipalities to pass truancy ordinances and would clearly articulate that local ordinances passed under the enabling act’s authority are part of the juvenile justice system’s pre-adjudication framework. If acceptable to Dept. of ED, this would then allow school districts to share “education records” with the ordinance enforcement folks under FERPA’s “juvenile justice system” exception. Much better way to approach it.

It’s not clear when the feds might offer input on the agreed language. If the city wants to change the law this spring, it’s cutting it close. The Legislature’s spring session, which started in January, is scheduled to end May 31.