Woodstock schools - only 1% truancy?

This morning's Northwest Herald has an interesting front-page article on truancy in McHenry County. Chronic truancy rates for certain districts are shown on the front page:

4% Dist. 50 (Harvard)
1.5% D-156
1.4% D-157
1% D-200 (62 students in this category)

"Chronic" is defined as "absent without valid cause for 10% percent of more of the previous 180 (sic) of the school year.

Here's what made me wonder about reported numbers, at least for Woodstock. I am familiar with one student's absenteeism a few years back. He was absent more than 60% of the time. (I later learned that bullying was one of the reasons he didn't want to go to school, and that included bullying by staff (personally observed by a technical consultant from the Illinois State Board of Education)). And he never was reported truant to the McHenry County Regional Office of Education (ROE)!

So, is this maybe like the reports of no racial profiling at the sheriff's department? Are the actual numbers higher? Which, of course, might incur the wrath of the ISBE.

When I complained and tried to get to the root of the problem, I was told by the then-Assistant Superintendent of D-200 and then-Director of Special Education (no longer employed by D-200), that every truancy was reported daily to the McHenry County ROE. In other words, District 200 wasn't expected to solve the problem; it was up to the ROE. The inference was that the ROE must not have done its job.

As it happened, I was already acquainted with Joe Williams at the ROE, and I called him a few days later. He laughed and asked, "Where did you hear that?" He explained that the ROE does not get daily absence reports and that the student's school is the first line of action in correcting absenteeism. Only if the school could not solve the problem would they then call in the ROE.

Which was exactly as I had understood the process!

Some people at District 200 think I am hard to get along with. Sometimes I am. When a District 200 employee lies to me or blows smoke at me, I am very hard to get along with.

Last fall I raised a question about capacity on school buses, because I had heard about overcrowding on buses. My email was forwarded from the transportation department to an administrator at the District office. When he responded, thinking that his email would go back to the employee who had sent it to him, the wonderful glitch in the D-200 email system came into play and routed his email to me. What did he write on November 2?

"Could I see your response before you send it to him.  I'm sure he's fishing for a new project since he won't be the new sheriff tomorrow."

Nice, huh?