Municipal Services Committee - Regular Meeting

Good afternoon. I'd like to call this meeting of the Safety and Licensing Committee for Wednesday, 05/13/2026, 05:30PM, to order. Please rise and join me for the Pledge of Allegiance.

I pledge allegiance to the flag of The United States Of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation

under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

All right. Roll call of membership. Let the record show that all members are present. Chairperson Croat is joining us remotely. So in his absence, I'm Alderson Fenton from District 6, and I'll be physically chairing the meeting. All right. And let's do introductions from my left.

Gaia Jones, District 10.

Patrick Dadeham, District 10.

Okay. Our first item of business is approval of minutes from the previous meeting, '20 six-six forty two, the safety Licensing Committee minutes from April 29. Move to approve. All right. We have a motion and a second. Are there any updates or corrections to the meeting minutes? All right. Seeing none, we'll go ahead and vote. All those in favor, please signify by saying aye. Aye.

All right. Public hearings and appearances. We have a number of public hearings for demerit point violations, and I'll talk about that for a little bit in a minute. If we've got other people who are here, and I see that there are some other folks present, including our Appleton Area School District folks that we know, Just a note on council rules. If you want to speak on an item that appears on the agenda, you absolutely have the right to do so.

And when we get to the action items, or the information I'm sorry after we do our public hearings here, I'll ask for anybody who wishes to speak on another item. If the item does not appear on the agenda, we can't take public comment on it. In order to stay in compliance with open records, open meetings rules, If something isn't if we have discussion of something that isn't noticed to the public, then we could be in violation of those rules. So we can only take public comment on an item that appears on the agenda, either as an action item or an information item. So hopefully that's clear.

So what we're going to do first is do these public hearings on these demerit point violations, and then I will ask if there's anybody who wishes to speak on an item that appears on the agenda. If you're listed on the agenda, you can speak when it's your turn. Okay. I've made that clear. All right, so we have five of these one, two, three, four, I'm sorry of these demerit point violation appearances.

So I'll call them in order. So on these demerit point violation appearances, they have been convicted of an alcohol license violation. I think all but one of these was serving to a minor. One of them, I think, was open after hours. I'm not sure.

I can't remember, sorry. So they're called here after these violations to essentially let us know why it happened and to let the committee know what steps they're taking to so that this won't happen again. Alright, so our first one is twenty six-four forty six, demerit point violation appearance for Valley Mobile. Is there anyone here for Valley Mobile? Okay, we'll move to the next '1, twenty six-four forty seven, demerit point appearance for Pizzeria Pub and Bar.

Is there okay. So if you just come to the podium and state your name and address for the record. And then again, we just want to talk about how the violation happened and what steps you're taking to prevent similar things in the future.

Alright. Yeah. My name is Satabir Singh. My address is W 6028 Blazing Star Drive, Appleton, Wisconsin. Ma'am, that day that night when officer came, it's 02:00 or something that time, and whoever working over there, he just swiping card, and the officer gave us ticket on 201.

Like, we just close now before twenty minute every day. After that, like, another guy, he just leaving and he put sip a last sip, and we get ticket. That's why, like, it's 201. Closing time is 02:00. But we close now before twenty minute. Yeah. But I think so. If they can give us warning, that's fine too, but it's 02:01. You know, it's almost beer empty, and he just drink a last sip, and we lose that point. So I'm worried about all these points.

So we no need like that things on our business.

Okay. So what you're saying is that you have just quit serving earlier in order to make sure that people are done by closing time?

Yeah, we after before twenty minutes, we close every night, ma'am, now. Okay. Yeah.

Okay. Does anybody from the committee have any questions? Okay. Thank you for appearing here, and, you know, just be careful. Okay, ma'am. Thank you. Thank you, guys. All right. Moving to twenty six and if you have already spoken to us, you're free to leave. We don't need to take any more action after that. Thank you. All right, twenty six-four forty eight, the demerit point violation appearance for, Katsuya of Japan. Is there anyone here?

All

right. Again, step forward, give your name and address for the record.

Hi, my name is Lisa. I'm with Katsuya of Japan at 338 W. College Avenue. We recently had a violation towards our alcohol license in January. Our bartender read the ID wrong and therefore served the minor.

Minor. And to make sure this doesn't happen again, we've been reviewing our policies and procedures in regards to serving alcohol to all of our customers. We're retrained our staff on our policies with serving alcohol and how thoroughly the IDs. We've been hanging more signs around the restaurant in the back displaying the legal drinking age and how to read all different formats of IDs. And we've also been increasing our management supervision throughout the whole restaurant by having supervisors in all the dining rooms as well as the bar area, and as well as, like, overall supervision by the GM. Implementing these improvements for this violation will not happen again Okay.

Thank you. And you know, as was noted in the letter you got, the Appleton Police Department offers free training if you wanted to ever take advantage of that. All right. Thank Thank you for coming this evening. All right. Our last demerit point violation of appearance, number 2049 is for Tipsy Taco and Tequila Bar. Is there anyone here from Tipsy Taco? All right. Well, thank you all for coming and those of you I'm sorry. Thank you.

Thank you, Alder Lambrecht. So can you just state your name and address for the record? Yeah, Ryan Van Zeeland. And you're with Valley Mobile, correct?

Valley Mobile.

Thank you so much. Thank you so much.

So yeah, we had an incident January 19, believe it was, when it actually happened. An employee that we've had for three years, at least three years, sold a white cloth to a minor, part of an operation that the police were working on. That employee had, we have three years of her signing off saying that she knows our policy, is to ID everybody. She was also a bouncer at her second job. So she had a one time lapse of judgment there.

There were some other issues that we've had with her in the past, and that was kind of the final straw with us. We ended up terminating her on next day, on her next shift. Not truly just that, but there was other issues. So that employee terminated right away. Our policy is that we ID everybody. We train our staff. We do yearly re trainings and have them sign off on it every year. So I guess that's the case with this one.

Okay. Okay. And again, Appleton Police Department does offer free training for if you ever wanted to take advantage of that. The number was on the letter you got.

I did have another question. On the paperwork that I got, it says that we we already had 80 demerit points. And I'm kind of curious what that was from because the only other thing was about gambling machines from last year, I believe it was. But we never heard we came to a meeting here. We were supposed to get a call from the attorney. We never got a call, and we never heard anything else from it.

Okay. I think I see Attorney Berwyn pulling the microphone. What microphone are you on?

District 4.

Okay. So Attorney Berwyn.

Thank you. So I need to confirm, looking back records wise, but the letter indicates the points total that are accrued over the past twenty four months. There is another prior. The violation approximately a year ago was another service to underage person and it is within twelve months. So the 80 points for this offense would be countable.

There is going back a little bit further and I don't know how this fell through the cracks here unfortunately but there was a violation for unlawful gambling machines that is still within the three year time period so those points would be countable as well and I believe that would be 150 points by itself. So looking at that, I am reviewing the matter for likely action on the alcohol license in this case. That is the status of it at this point.

Okay. You. I see Alder Krott has his hand up.

Yes. Thank you, Chair Fenton. If we could have Attorney Berwyn just explain the situation with the first 80 not really counting, but they show up on these reports? It's a statute state statute thing? Correct. So apologies.

So the points exist for the purposes of city code, but we're not permitted to take any action on an alcohol license with regard to a service to an underage individual unless they have a prior violation of that same statute within the twelve months preceding it. So I loathe this terminology, but the way people talk about it is basically they get a free pass a year, which is what it kind of amounts to.

So Attorney Berwyn, can you what the illegal gambling machines what's the point demerit point for that one?

I believe that's a 150 violation.

In and of itself?

In and of itself. Okay.

So so that that plus the second would take them over the limit. Okay. Thank you.

So

I would assume that you will get further contact from the city attorney's office.

Once I've confirmed the records.

They've confirmed the record. But thank you for appearing tonight.

Okay,

so

this completes our public hearings. So I want to go ahead just from the members of the public who are here, are not with the school district. Can I have a show of hands of people who are here to talk about the truancy update? Okay, I see one. And there are other people here to talk about another action.

Is everyone else who's not with the district here to talk about another item that's on the agenda? Okay, okay. Just wanted to make sure that everybody who is here is here to talk about something that's on the

I just have a question. I'm just here to talk about getting my liquor license.

You are an action item, we're good there. All right, thank you. Thank you. Did not mean to make this conversational. I apologize. All right. So that brings us to our first action item, 2041, the operator license for Tammy T. Taylor. So what we have here is the police department recommendation for denial. So we'll have a motion. So the motion here would be to deny. We'll call you up to speak and as soon as we finish our

I move to approve the recommendation.

Okay. Okay. So we have a motion and a second. First, I'm going to hear from the attorney, if I could, on this. Or do I need to hear from police department? Any is Chief Olson, is there anything police has to add to the letter? Okay. All right. So Attorney Berwyn, I think you're still on.

I am. So just to provide an outline of the situation here, in addition to the information provided by Lieutenant Gooden, I did submit a memorandum that I believe has been added to the revised agenda that kind of goes through the eligibility criteria as they apply in this particular set of circumstances. To summarize it, the basis for the denial is a criminal conviction, which is an exempt criminal conviction. That is part of the select classification of criminal convictions for which the allowances to demonstrate rehabilitation do not apply. So the only question is whether or not the conviction is substantially related to the licensed activity, Given the nature of the conviction, the nature of the service of alcohol to presumably increasingly intoxicated individuals, I think it's pretty clear that there is a substantial relationship between the conviction and the activity.

That's not to say whether or not the applicant is capable of performing the duties. That's not the question. Nor is the question whether or not she's able to work in this capacity. The question really just comes down to whether or not she's eligible for the license. And based on my review of the record and the statutes, she does not appear to be eligible statutorily for the license. So my assessment is that the license cannot be granted lawfully and that even if granted it would be void.

Thank you. So Ms. Taylor, did you understand all that? If you're going to speak, please come to the microphone.

That misdemeanor has been expunged from my record, and I literally have a paper right here stating the fact from Otigami County.

Attorney Berwyn, I'm going to go to you on that one.

I'm not aware that that changes it. If were a pardon, that'd be a different thing entirely. But I don't believe an expungement actually alters the evaluation. Although I have to confess, I've not specifically researched that item, but I've not seen any references to expungement in the eligibility criteria.

Can I ask a question?

Yes, Alder Lambrecht.

Oh,

I apologize. What one

are District 5. Can you remind me what, Attorney Berwyn, what the expungement means with regards, in a legal term, with regards to convictions?

In the broad sense and I don't have the statute in front of me or the background in front of me to give you the hyper technical version of it. But essentially, it removes it from the court record. It doesn't invalidate the conviction. It doesn't invalidate the supporting records that would go along with it. But it basically similar to sealing it, removing it that's the quick version of it. But I would need to I'm not prepared to get into the technicalities of it right now. This is not something I was expecting.

So given that and I'm asking the members of the committee here would it be appropriate to hold this until our next meeting so that Attorney Berwyn could do the additional research just to make absolutely certain that Okay.

I have a motion to

hold. I just say

one more thing just really quick. I just wanted to say one more thing. During this time, I did exactly what the lawyer told me I needed to do, the community service and the stuff like this, and this was back in 1998 when this happened. And I was told that it was expunged from my record, and I did not need to claim that I had a misdemeanor on the application, so that's why I did not do that. And I do have a letter here from them, like I said. So that's why I did not put on there that I had previous misdemeanor, is because I was told I did not need to by my lawyer.

Okay.

So

the action that we're looking to take here that we've got a motion for is to hold this until our next meeting, which would be in two weeks, so that our city, the legal department, can do all of the research. As he stated in the summary, there are some offenses for which our hands are tied. License. But we want to make sure that we have everything in order. So what we're looking to do here is to hold this for two weeks until we make sure.

Now I know I assume that you are aware that you may work in the meantime, but there has to be a licensed operator present when you work. All right. So thank you for coming and

I'll withdraw my motion for the approval. Okay. Thank you. And instead move you. To

withdraw the

And then I will move to hold this until the next safety and licensing Second.

Okay. So do I come here in two weeks as well?

Hang on one So Clerk Molitor, did you get that?

I did. Yes, please.

Just for the record, you do have a provisional license that is valid until May 27, so you are actually able to work on your own with your provisional license until a decision is made one way or another or the provisional license expires.

Thank you.

Thank you for that clarification, Clerk Pollarder. Appreciate it. Okay. So we have a motion and a second to hold. All in favor?

Aye.

Okay. Alder Croats votes aye. So that motion to hold passes five-zero. So this will once again appear on our two weeks from today at our next meeting.

Thank you.

Thank you. All right. Moving to the rest of our action items, I would entertain a motion to take those

Oh, move to take them

Balance of the agenda?

Move to approve. Second. Balance the agenda.

Okay. Okay. Is there any one item that anybody wants separate? All right. So what so we're approving we're moving to approve 2065. This is Stone Arch for a license for Art in the Park. 20 100, this is an amendment for a capital center 20 six-six forty five, the temporary license for Fox Valley Pride for the Rotary Club of Appleton and 2044, temporary for Appleton Downtown Inc. For the summer music series. Welcome to summer. Okay.

We have a motion and a second for the balance of the agenda. All in favor? Aye. So and Alder Crook votes aye. That passes five-zero. All right, so we're going to move to our information items. And because we I got the approval of most of the committee here, so because we've got some people who want to speak, I'm going to shift the agenda a little bit and take the Gold Cross presentation first, if that's Okay with everybody here. And so we're going to bring Nick Romanesco up.

Good evening. Thank you for having me tonight. I think the last time I was here I got to skip Superintendent Hartress as well, I apologize about that. I just introduced myself. I know there's some new members of the committee here tonight.

So I'm Nick Romanesco. I'm the executive director for Gold Cross Ambulance. Gold Cross is the primary nine eleven paramedic ambulance provider for the City Of Appleton. About three years ago, we entered into a more formal agreement with the City of Appleton really just to begin to outline deliverables, how we exchange information, how we collaborate and work together as really joint responders to medical and traumatic emergencies, and this is our kind of biannual report, so you can kind of see what work has been done over the last two and a half years, what are some of the positives that have become as a result of the work we've done together, and then just kind of a culmination of everything that we've done. So what I'll do is I'll just kind of highlight some of the changes, some of the additions that we've had in the last six months.

So starting really with the support and training and education section there, we actually, for the first time to my knowledge, had some joint scenario based training with the Appleton Fire Department. So we actually got some on duty staff members together, and as they've upgraded to a paramedic engine going on almost a year now, we've really wanted to work together and make sure that we understand what the responsibilities are of both parties when we're working together on scenes. There is some minor differences. We have different medical directors, so at times medical directors have different perspectives on how protocols should be written. We have pretty, really close alignment, but this was really our opportunity too just to have some real life scenario based exercises so that we can go through, okay, if we encounter this type of patient, what are the differences and how do we make sure we work together on those things.

Ironically enough, we had those scenarios the next day in the state of Appleton. That exact scenario that we trained on was encountered by Gold Cross and the Appleton Fire Department paramedics. They worked together very collaboratively, and it was a great, you know, kind of affirmation that doing these things more often and continuing to work together for training education really pays off on the streets for both Gold Cross and Appleton Fire Department. Moving into response time goal compliance, so kind of how we have this table set up if you haven't seen it before. Really what we are looking at is the emergency ninetieth percentile, so that's the 90% call.

So if we have 100 calls, what's the ninetieth call? Obviously, that's expanded to the total call volume that we see in the city of Appleton. You have emergency. If you look really in 2021, there were some challenges that we were trying to overcome as an organization, and we were at nine minutes and forty seconds, and we've improved that in year three to eight minutes and sixteen seconds, so had some very positive improvements in the emergency ninetieth percentile. You'll see the same thing as you go left to right, top to bottom.

Nonemergency ninetieth percentile went from thirteen thirty five to eleven twenty. And then percent compliance, so our goal is eight minutes and fifty nine seconds from the time we receive the call from the county dispatch to the time we arrive on scene to the patient. And we went from ninety point four three percent compliance. Our goal is ninety percent, so really close to not meeting that threshold. Now we're all the way up to ninety four point four nine percent this year.

Non emergency, we're at sixty six point three one percent and again have gone up to 73.83%. We had a small dip in year two, if you look kind of on the numbers and you look on those charts there, and I'll talk about kind of what we do as an organization to proactively make system improvements in order to make sure that we don't see that dip turn into a trend. So I'll get into that in a couple of the other sections here. Moving down to communications, that's something we continually work on. The difficulty is typically our response times are pretty close to one another, so there isn't a ton of time that we actually have to communicate via radio.

Most of the time it's face to face interactions. So the sample size in this chart is extremely small. You're talking 10 to 12 calls of the two forty calls that we run. Emergency, we run almost 600 calls in the city of Appleton, so we only have 10 to 12, sometimes 20 chances to interact via radio. It's a small sample size, but we've seen some slight improvement from year one to year two when we started tracking this in our year two with the agreements.

Moving into local medical directors, one of the more interesting things we did over the last six months is at times we have patients or individuals who like to call 911 more frequently than others, and sometimes that can create challenges for the fire department as well as Gold Cross, because we're having to utilize resources for these types of patients instead of going to the more higher acuity patients. And when this happens over and over again, we really do our best to try to get them resources. So what we ended up doing was we worked with the Appleton Police Department, Appleton Fire Department, and our local medical directors, and we had one on one meetings with these individuals, and we really focused on deterrence of utilizing the 91 system, giving them different resources in their home, and making sure they weren't using us as the only resource for their medical care. So we've been doing that more and more and we're seeing some positive outcomes, so I think that's just a great example of the collaboration between Gold Cross and City of Appleton Public Safety Resources. Moving into kind of just overall requests for service, pretty consistent year to year.

What we're seeing kind of organizationally as a trend, we're seeing more non emergency or non lights and sirens requests come in through the 91 system. That's kind of we're seeing as a whole, and you see that trend there pretty consistently. The numbers are going up on the nonemergency category versus the emergency category. One thing that we have added, and I'll go into kind of that dip that we talked about with response times, is when we were evaluating our response time data and information, what we were finding that the times that we were really struggling on the 09:11 side of things is when we were busy on the interfacility side. So how Gold Cross operates, our ambulances do about 80% of their day is spent doing 09:11 work.

The other 20% is interfacility transports from hospital hospitals. We're jointly owned by Thetacare and Ascension, so part of the work that we do is help individuals in the hospitals that need to get from point A to point B. And at times they get busy, we try to balance that the best we can, but it ends up at times we get burnt on the nine eleven system. So what we did in the last year was we fortified and deployed three specific inter facility only ambulances. So that's all they do.

That's all their focus is. So we added one in the Wapaca County region. I know it doesn't seem like that's going to impact the city of Appleton, but what we were finding is when we were below that response time metrics, were having ambulances go out to Wapaca from the Appleton area to fetch a patient. So we added more infrastructure out there, and then again in our southern market we service hospitals in Oshkosh, Berlin, Wild Rose, and Al Fond Du Lac. Again, we're pulling from our core Fox Valley to service these hospitals.

So we worked really closely with the hospital systems to add these resources in, and we've seen really positive outcomes. I know sometimes it looks like we're not adding the right resources, but we're adding the resources where they're needed, which was on the inter facility side of things. So it truly helped us fortify our nine eleven operations and make sure that we have ambulances available consistently and we're meeting those response type metrics. And then one thing we always like to highlight is our whole blood program. So we're one of only a handful of ambulance providers in the state that are able to deploy whole blood on the ambulances.

We have a rapid response vehicle that will go and intercept with an ambulance on scene of a severely traumatic incident or a medical incident that requires whole blood and providing that life saving intervention. So we've had really positive outcomes in the city of Appleton. You guys are the number one utilizers of that whole blood, so we're very happy to be able to provide that to the community. And then some just marked improvements on the patient care metrics. One thing, too, that Mission Lifeline award there we submit in May for 2025, so end of May that's due, so hopefully next time I meet you'll have another gold award that we can celebrate for our cardiac stroke and STEMI care that we do in the city of Appleton.

But moving into patient care metrics, so we've had improvements in our stroke patient. Our goal to, from the time we arrived and recognized to get that ambulance in the hospital, going to the hospital is fourteen minutes and eight seconds. We've seen an improvement from fourteen fifty three in year one, seventeen twenty in year two, to fourteen oh eight, so making improvements there. One thing we have a challenge on right now between organizations is our cardiac monitors and the cardiac monitors that the Appleton Fire Department is using right now, the softwares don't communicate very well. And there's supposed to be something coming down the pike so we can actually communicate and we can get that data.

So when you look at the door to EKG time, a lot of times if the app environment arrives on scene first, applies that 12 lead, that data is missed, which theoretically it's going be good data. So we hope to fix that kind of barrier that we have right now with the software systems, and that number will pull down a little bit more. So far cardiac arrest survivors, we've actually doubled from last year in a very short period of time, so we've had some good outcomes with our cardiac arrest survivors in the city of Afton so far. And then finally, I should say two things. On the bottom there you look at, it's called Utstein criteria, so we submit information to a CARES registry.

It's a benchmarking system that Emory University uses to determine your quality of care for cardiac arrest. Their data for twenty twenty five hasn't come out yet, so I hope to have updated information for our next iteration as well. The last thing that we added on this report for this was kind of the donated event hours that we do. So there are a lot of events that happen in the city of Appleton, obviously you guys are well aware of that, and oftentimes these are nonprofit fundraising initiatives, but they still are going to require hours that need coverage for EMS services. So over the last three years, we've donated four forty two event hours, non contracted.

We've staffed resources. We've donated those hours to these events in the state of Appleton to make sure that you guys have safe and effective events. So overall, I think the agreements operate exactly the way we wanted it to. Certainly some things that we're going to tweak and look at for future iterations of an agreement. We've already kind of started discussions with the fire department and the mayor on what that's going to look like, so I hope we have some more to share on that in the next six months or so. But certainly from a Gold Cross perspective, we're very grateful for the partnership and the collaboration. We hope to continue to work together effectively.

Okay. So thank you. Appreciate the upward trend in the numbers. Any questions for Mr. Romanesco up here? Chief Hansen, anything you'd like to say? Okay, well thank you so much for coming in tonight.

Thank you.

Thank you for the very detailed report. I saw Alder Croda, I apologize.

No, you just stated what I was going to state. I just thank Gold Cross for these updates that they've been providing. It's very detailed, information, and I'm happy to see the collaboration with Appleton Fire Department. Thank you, Nick.

Thank you.

You. Apologies for I don't see out of that side as well. You. Thank you, Mr. Romanesco. Okay, so before we get to Superintendent Hargis and team, before we get into your presentation, we've got some people who'd like to speak, so we're going to go ahead and recognize them and let them speak, if that's okay with you all. So whoever would like to speak, I understand everybody's here to talk about the truancy ordinance update, so whoever's first, come on up, state your name and address, and you'll have the floor.

Is the chair setting a time limit

for everybody?

So we tend to say five minutes. I don't have the board here so we're just gonna to I'm going to just watch my computer. And then again, just sort of if something's been said, don't necessarily repeat it just in the interest. But other than that, anybody?

Alder Crow.

Oh, Alder Crow, did you have something to say?

No, thank you, Chair. I was just going to ask you to reiterate the point about not having repeated

comments Yeah. I think I did, right? Okay. Yeah, so just in the interest of time, if somebody else has made a point, we don't want to necessarily make the same point. But alright, welcome.

Everybody

will get their turn.

Hello. Hi. My name is Michelle Polly. My address is 316 East Benton Drive, Appleton. I'm a parent of two students in the Appleton Area School District and I've spoken to you before.

You've received emails from me in communications. I didn't realize I was going to have a chance to speak tonight, so I'm sorry if I'm a little discombobulated here. But I did want to say, as I pointed out in the last email that I sent to this committee, I was disheartened when I saw this agenda and saw the presentation that was going to be given by AASD, specifically page four, where they talk about the survey that they gave. Because it's been a trend. I have watched if I haven't attended every meeting on this topic, school board and city, I've watched it by video.

And the trend has been a misrepresentation of information, in my opinion. This started out in the listening sessions that this was supposed to be the last resort for a very small amount of children or students, excuse who are not attending school at all and were having no contact with the school district despite multiple attempts. I have listened to meetings, I have sat into meetings where I've heard about it's now being talked about, Well, if students are coming to school because they heard there's a citation, that's okay. It's never presented as a preventative measure as it is now.

I've heard

people from the school district speak about how this is not punitive. By definition, it's punitive. And just because you say it's not, doesn't make it so. Even tonight, we had an individual come in here and say she thought her record was expunged so she could work somewhere. We were told that if students never paid this fine, this wouldn't follow them into adulthood, This wouldn't impact them.

This would be expunged if they just went to school. What does that mean? We saw tonight that it's affecting somebody's life from the '90s. It's not what it was presented to be. And this slide is just another example of that.

I went and I did extra work and asked extra questions because I came to this committee meeting last month, and this was presented in a very rushed manner. There were no questions that were asked because they had to get to a meeting about a referendum. Convenient distraction. So I went and I asked further questions. This slide says 187 out of four zero nine students.

And while it doesn't give a complete misrepresentation that only students whose attendance approved were given the survey, it doesn't indicate that 126 students took the survey. It doesn't indicate that two twenty two students never took it because their attendance didn't improve. It's misleading. I had to read it three or four times before I could understand what was trying to be said here. I have been very respectful.

I have been very trusting of this body, of the city, of the school district. But this was just, like, it for me. Me. I don't call out people's names. I don't put anybody on the spot, and I try not to do gotcha moment moments because I worked as a social worker.

I worked in systems where things weren't always done the right way. And it's not fun when you're called out as an individual. But as a system, this is not okay. And I really hope that this committee asked some tough questions tonight and holds this district accountable because I will go back to my first and foremost concern. The research shows this doesn't work. I've shared that research. Thank you.

Unofficial time, but we're

about One more thing. Five Five to ten years from now, all the faces change. How do we enforce it? Thank you. Anyone

else?

Welcome. Hi. My name is Kristen Kelly, I am a resident of Appleton as well as a executive director of a nonprofit that serves Appleton residents. I wasn't expecting to to speak today, so I just put something together. So give me some grace.

People of Progression is a culturally based organization serving Outagamie County and the Appleton Area School District. We work closely with families across our community who are navigating complex challenges every day, housing instability, transportation barriers, mental health concerns, community violence, caregiving responsibilities, poverty, discrimination, and systems that weren't designed to meet all of the needs of all of the different backgrounds of people who are in this community. When we talk about truancy, we have to be careful not to frame families as uncaring or unwilling. In our experience at POP, most parents deeply want their children in school and thriving at the same time. Barriers are much bigger than being not in compliance, and sometimes a family has no reliable transportation, and also a parent may be working multiple jobs.

Sometimes youth are struggling with anxiety, bullying, grief, housing instability, and unmet behavioral health needs, and also dealing with stressors of being marginalized in a school district that doesn't fully represent them. So I just heard someone talk about that their peer had also been impacted for decades later by a truancy fine from the '90s. That alone should make us pause and ask whether this approach truly helps families or creates

I want to just a little bit of correction. The other individual that we were talking about here in the meeting, it was not a truancy violation. This was a completely different criminal violation that we were talking about there. So I think that the principle applies that

it

can follow you later. It was definitely not truancy violation.

Thank you. Although we have seen with black and brown individuals that fines and punitive allegations or charges against them in courts sometimes affects them throughout their lifetime. So me myself, I went to a different school district, very neighboring Tappleton area school district. I just want to share that I had peers who were darker toned than me, who would experience truancy fines, and then me, because I live in a white family, and in a predominantly white school district that I was in, I was not receiving fines, and those fines did not move with me through the school district. So I'd just be also wondering how we're going to make sure that there isn't biases, as well as the support that the family needs, no matter who they are and who they're representing, because some of the reason why students are not showing up for school is because they don't feel represented.

And that's actual data that comes back to our organization at People of Progression through community assessments. At a later meeting, I can bring community assessments to this room that we have 75 collected now around school needs, so I think that that data, if called upon by culturally based organizations, whether Latinx, blacks serving, Hmongs serving, I think that that data needs to be understood and looked at to see if the needs of the community are being met in the schools, to understand why kids aren't coming to school, to then be able to look into that and see how can we meet the gap to actually have them coming to school instead of punitive things against the youth. Instead, I think that it's opposite of what it should be happening, and that we should be asking the families why and with representation that meet their needs to be able to be fully heard, understood, and listened to, and have that data collected in a way that makes sense to the families.

Thank you. And I am speaking for myself only, but think I probably speak for a lot of my colleagues that I would be very interested in seeing this data, and even before another meeting if you could email and we'll get you contact information or you can just from the website you can there's a contact your elder person or contact all elder persons And I do think we would be very interested in seeing that. Okay. But thank you for coming tonight. All right. Anybody else from the public who wishes to speak? You. So I'm going to turn it over to Superintendent Hargis and his team for their presentation.

Yeah, good evening. Thank you for giving us an opportunity to provide an update again on our attendance efforts and how they relate to the city ordinance. You have a document in front of you and we'll speak to that document. And because there are three new members of your committee, I will review our January report. And so the January report was specific to first semester. And then we also reported in March at a meeting here of safety and licensing, we'll review that. And then we'll get into some new information as well. So if you turn to page two, this is from first semester. And it's data again that we shared in January. It's chronic absenteeism data.

If you look at the box that's highlighted in yellow, twenty two point three percent of our high school students were chronically absent during the first semester of this year. And when you look at the four years that were prior to that coming out of the pandemic, you see that it's the best rate that we've had in those years. It's not as good yet as pre pandemic numbers. So you'll see that in 2018, 2019, the rate was just over fifteen percent. And that's certainly a direction we hope we can continue to go.

Chronic absenteeism are for students, regardless of whether an absence is excused or unexcused, that have missed 10% or more of school days. So first semester, that's nine days. Any questions on that first chronic absenteeism from the first semester? Yes.

Oh, Okay. I'm going to call on Alder Hayden, and then I see Alder Haffner Or in do you want to take questions in, or do you want to wait till the end?

We can take them on each page of the document.

Okay. Okay. I'm going go to Alder Hayden, and then I saw Alder Heffernan.

Yeah. Just one question. You refer to semester one. What were the dates of semester one? And was the truancy ordinance in place when that happened?

The truancy ordinance went in place in November. And the semester started in September, so essentially September 2. It was about a little over halfway through the semester.

Thank you. So it wasn't fully implemented at the time that these numbers so it dropped with it implemented halfway through. Correct. Thank you.

Alright. Alder Heffernan, I saw you. What mic are you on? I'm sorry.

So to the point of some public candor that we've heard tonight, this was presented as an absolute last ditch effort. So I'm wondering why we're that's my first question is why we're even talking about chronic absenteeism as those are excused absences. Is that correct?

Unexcused and excused. Absent form of absences.

Okay. So the chronic absenteeism is a combination of unexcused and excused. Correct.

So it's

okay. And then my next question is that I see here in 2023 and 2024 there was already a drop down at twenty three point seven percent. So it really and looking at these over the years, there seems to

be

some fluctuation. So 22.3% doesn't strike

me. Is that significant?

I agree. I agree it's not that significant.

Okay. So I wouldn't then think that the truancy ordinance has made that big of an impact. And we can't I'm also aware that the district has implemented several contracted services needs for supportive interventions even before the truancy ordinance. So would it not be possible that the attendance also could be attributed to that as opposed to the truancy ordinance?

I would like to wait until you hear from Stephanie Marta, who's going to talk about interventions. And as an attendance coordinator, she can answer that. We are not going to put one support in place and then wait to see if that has worked over a period of time. We most likely are going to put several different supports in place. So we are continuously looking for ways to help students be successful. This ordinance, we believe, is a significant factor in helping kids be successful, but there certainly are other supports that we've put in place, yes.

I absolutely agree that we should do that, but then we can't necessarily attribute the data to one thing. If we're not only focusing on one support, then we wouldn't look at this one support as the deciding factor in the significance, which is not that significant, drops.

Alder Hefzman So really do want to give everybody the opportunity to ask all their questions, but let's let them finish because I have a whole list of my own. We'll let them finish. I mean, if you have specific questions on a specific page, but in terms of the general concepts. We don't have a meeting after us. We have time. All right. So Superintendent Harges.

If you turn to page three, this has the habitual truancy data. So this is the data from first semester, again, on students who have missed all or part of five school days, but they are unexcused. So truant means they were not excused. You can see first semester here, had 23.1%. And that is lower than any of the previous semesters that we've had here, including before the pandemic.

So it's our best semester in several years. When we put those two together, the next chart shows that thirteen percent of our students, our high school students, were both chronically absent and habitually truant. And that's five fifty six students. So I'm on page three here. Last year, that number was eight sixty six. The year before, it was 09/21. So we've seen a 40% improvement in the number of students in the first semester who were chronically absent and habitually drunk. The most important piece, again, is not about coming to school. It's about success. Academic, social, and emotional success.

We're going to show how we believe that this has led to more success for students in the first semester. So in our March meeting, we shared that 95% of all classes taken in the first semester were passed across our high schools. This isn't in the chart anymore. So just verbalizing, ninety five percent is our best rate in over nine semesters. And what that means is that we had over 400 more classes were passed first semester this year than the average over the previous four years.

At that same meeting in March, we also broke down the five fifty six students and the demographics of those students. We talked about the resolution and the requirements that were put in place in that resolution. And many of them aren't relevant because they pertain to judges and the actions of judges. And no student has seen a judge. The one student that received a citation thus far this year has not seen a judge.

They were met with the court commissioner. So we shared that information as well in March. And then we talked about our attendance education lessons and how successful those have been in the first semester. And so right now, Stephanie Marta is going to talk further about those attendance lessons. Again, we did speak to those in March.

She's going to review that data and the survey of students who improved their attendance after coming to the attendance lessons. And then she'll go into third quarter data and then also some academic data from the first semester that we haven't previously shared with you. So any other questions on this page on habitual truancy, the combination of the two? Okay. I will turn it over to Stephanie Marta then.

Welcome. Hi, good evening everyone. Thank you again for giving us another opportunity to provide an update on student attendance. So if you'll turn your attention to page four, I'm just going to share again. We did share an update in March, but I'll just share again regarding one of the key initiatives implemented this school year has been our monthly attendance education lessons at each of the high schools.

So students who meet the threshold for habitual truancy, which as a reminder is defined as five or more unexcused absences all are part of a school day within a semester. So those students are requested to attend these lessons during their flex period, which is a non instructional period where students can seek out assistance during the school day in various classes, but they're requested to come during that time. So the purpose of these lessons is not simply punitive. Instead, they're intended to educate students about the importance of attendance, help them understand the long term impact that attendance has on academics, help them understand that attendance has on academics and graduation, connect them with supports, and clearly communicate potential legal consequences when attendance patterns do not improve or are significant. As shared with the committee in March, we collected data from students who attended lessons in November and December.

Across the district's three high schools, four zero nine students participated in these lessons. Of those four zero nine students, 187, nearly forty six percent, improved their attendance rate following participation in the lesson. We then invited those students to complete a survey and that had been requested as part of the resolution by City Council back in October before the citation was reinstated. And this was to better understand what these students found helpful and why their attendance improved following the lessons. So we received 126 responses.

That's out of 187 students resulting in a response rate of sixty seven percent. Two themes consistently emerged in the student feedback. First was that adults genuinely care about them and want them to succeed. And second, that understanding the potential consequences of truancy was having an influence on their decision making. If you move on to page five, when asked why they thought their attendance had improved since attending the lesson, nearly fifty two percent of students indicated that they wanted to avoid a truancy citation.

Lack of motivation was the most common reason identified by sixty three percent of the respondents when asked what challenges they still face and make it difficult to attend school regularly, which is outlined on slide six. The other two survey questions were open ended. So they were, what part of the attendance lesson was most helpful to you? And what could the school do to help students improve their attendance? Students shared comments such as, the consequences later on made me decide to change what I did to avoid any of that.

The part of the lesson that was most helpful to me was when Sergeant Hoffman gave a speech on how he wants to help us as students try to avoid getting truancy citations. Another student said, When all of the teachers started talking about how they want us to graduate and want us to follow our dreams, it shows that coming to school is really important to us and to them. Another student indicated, I think the lesson as a whole helped motivate me and realize the importance of being in class and also how important my attendance is. A part of the lesson that was helpful to me was that being here at school matters, and if I'm here more often I will get a better education. And finally another student said the flex lessons are very good, it's a very graceful warning to change the bad habits and I liked it.

So these are just a few out of the many students who provided responses to those questions. Students also provided valuable insight into barriers they continue to face. One student stated, Give the attendance speech to the parents, not to the students, because in my situation I don't have a car and the responsibility of getting here on time then falls on my parent. This feedback continues to reinforce what we already know. Attendance barriers are often complex and frequently extend beyond the school day itself.

And I believe our attendance teams at the high school level really do whatever they can to possibly work with families and partner with families to kind of figure out what are those attendance barriers and how can we provide supports to address those. So whenever we can, we partner with parents on those things. I would also like to share a brief example that illustrates the impact these lessons may be having. So after last month's attendance lesson at one of the high schools, I greeted a student as she was leaving and she told me that while her overall attendance was not poor, she had been skipping some individual classes during second semester. She then said she would never skip a class again because she did not want to receive a truancy citation or go to court.

What is significant about this interaction is that this student would likely never receive a citation. However, the awareness of the ordinance and the seriousness of attendance expectations clearly had an influence on her mindset. Moving on to page seven, in addition to reviewing the attendance lesson outcomes, we also analyzed first semester data related to chronic absenteeism and academic performance. So this is new information that I'm presenting tonight compared to what we presented back in March. So looking at first semester data, we identified 142 high school students who received three or more failing grades during first semester.

Of those one hundred and forty two students, one hundred and five of them, nearly seventy four percent, were chronically absent. So that's missing or 10 more of school days during the first semester, either excused or unexcused absences. Even more concerning is fifty nine of those students of those 142 students failed five or more classes. And so typically students have six or seven classes in their schedule, they've failed five or more, 59 of them. Of those 59 students, all but two, so ninety seven percent, were chronically absent.

These numbers continue to demonstrate the very strong connection between attendance and academic success. Our high schools have implemented numerous interventions to support students struggling with attendance. Only one student this school year has received the truancy citation and that occurred only after years of extensive outreach efforts failed, including phone calls, text messages, home visits. We did a county truancy referral. At the time the citation was issued, the student had not attended school for over a year.

The amount of time between the citation being issued and the student's initial court appearance was much longer than we initially anticipated, and now the student will soon be turning 18. Since then, we have met with the city attorney's office to collaborate on a more timely process moving forward for truancy citation cases, and I think we have a good plan in place regarding that. I do want to emphasize that citations are not being used as a first response, and I think that's reflected in that we've only given one citation this school year. School based interventions continue to be our primary focus. However, based on the outcome of one truancy citation that has been issued, I do believe we need to intervene by potentially introducing a citation earlier when students are not regularly attending school and are failing multiple classes, which ultimately is going to increase their likelihood that they won't graduate from high school.

We are continuing to use alternative programming for students who are credit deficient or are at risk of not graduating, although available spots remain limited at each high school. So following semester one, of those 105 students I mentioned who were chronically absent and received the three or more failing grades, twenty were placed into alternative programs within the district. We also continue to collaborate closely with county partners through truancy referrals. Currently, 51 of the 105 students involved with the county due to truancy referrals this year or last year or due to delinquency related involvement, so 51 of those students are involved with the county. County partnerships provide valuable resources and supports for many students and families.

However, participation remains voluntary and this is not an intervention that works for all of those who are referred, especially for students who are more disengaged in school and who are not participating in the supports being offered by the county. So I've mentioned the things that a lot of those 105 students are receiving. Of the remaining 105 students that I haven't touched on, 19 have been unenrolled from the district at some point since first semester. Four have demonstrated improved attendance following school based interventions, which is great. And 10 students are continuing to receive school based supports.

And I just want to comment, you had mentioned one of our committee members here had mentioned earlier about some of our contracted services, one of which is our truancy reduction and assessment center through the Boys and Girls Club. That program is not something new that's been in place since the early 2000s. So that's not a new program that we've added recently. They've been involved with our district for quite some time. So on to page eight, we would briefly like to discuss our third quarter attendance trends.

So overall, we continue to have reduced chronic absenteeism rates from the heightened levels we experienced following the pandemic. While rates have stabilized over the past several years, we are encouraged by trends related specific to habitual truancy, which is outlined on page nine. So over the past two years, habitual truancy at the high school level has decreased by nearly 10%, which is a very great number for us. It should be noted that we do not have quarter three habitual truancy data in this chart from the twenty twenty two-twenty three school year because habitual truancy is defined by semester and we did not actually start pulling that data quarterly until the twenty twenty three-twenty four school year. So that's why we have chronic absenteeism for four years of that and only three for habitual truancy.

So I just want to make sure to mention that. While our intervention systems and attendance team practices have continued strengthen over time, the two most significant changes implemented this year were the monthly attendance educations at each high school, which I touched on when I first began speaking, and then the second thing was the reinstatement of the truancy ordinance in the city of Appleton beginning in November. At this time, we believe both efforts may be contributing to the continued reduction in habitual truancy among our high school students. As we move forward, our goal remains the same. It's to ensure that students feel connected, supported, engaged, and successful in school while also reinforcing the importance of consistent attendance.

We know there is no single intervention that solves attendance challenges for every student. However, we are encouraged by the progress we're seeing and remain committed to continuing this work collaboratively with families, schools, and community community partners.

Thank you. Thank you. Just

one more slide and then we'll answer any On questions that you page 10 is just two dates. June 5 is our last day of school. That's three weeks from Friday. And then it takes us about two weeks to wrap up the school year. So we give kids maybe another week to week and a half to make up any work that we've done.

Then we'll next second semester data to share. And I know that I'll you have some meetings in June, and you'll have to make a decision about whether this goes forward for another period of time. We're certainly hoping that we could get another year to try this. As you heard, the one individual, the one student that did receive a citation took quite a long time to get through to be processed. And we've worked out those details with the city because the city has to be involved and then the court actually as well.

So that's what we're looking for. And we don't know how that fits with your meeting schedule. But certainly, it is our hope that we can provide that second semester data at some point late in June, and hopefully that meets your timeline.

Okay. I mean, and I'm sure that, Chairperson Croats had to leave the meeting, he made us aware that, we would have another meeting on this subject before. So I know we have quite a few questions. So if you want to be in the hot seat for a minute and if Ms. Marta needs to answer some of them, we can tag team. I know Alder Heffernan had some. I'm going

to It's just a quick data question. Okay.

Okay. So Alder Jones says she has a quick data question. Okay.

With the first two questions in your student survey, was that a singular response or were they able to pick as many as they wanted?

So for the two questions where I have the chart, yep, so they were able to pick as many as they wanted for those questions.

Can I just ask a follow-up on that?

Yes, Alder Lamb. Did you was that Alder Lamb? Yep.

Were the options identified responses. So these are obviously six or seven different options given. And I know in making any cider survey, you don't want to give too many options and those types of things. But can you just talk with me a little bit about how you determined the order or which options you provided those?

Sure. So we looked at some of the reasons that we typically are seeing for students who are struggling with attendance. What are some reasons that they may have talked about or things that came up during the lesson? So in that page five, those we kind of just came up with ideas, but there was an option for students to pick others. So if there was something else they had on their mind that wasn't related to this, they could write it in.

And many students did do that, but those were just some things we came up with that we thought relate to why they may have improved their attendance following our lesson. And then in the other one, what challenges do you still face? These obviously are challenges that we're seeing on a regular basis with students when we work with them. So we included those as our list of options that they could have checked. Otherwise, again, they could provide that other if they had other ideas.

Anyone else with here? I'm going to save mine. Older than While

we're on this, I would like to jump in with a question. I do agree with Ms. Polly, who came and spoke earlier, around the question of the other half side of it. It almost feels like there's a survivorship survivor bias with this survey where we're interviewing those that were successful but not getting into the students who we're kind of failing to reach. So I would really be interested, if you have any data around them, seeing why they think they're not going to school and why those ones are a little bit harder to reach because I think those are the ones that we really need to focus on because you solved that problem. I think these ones are much more amendable to coming to school.

So

one thing that we and we can certainly attempt to survey students who maybe aren't doing well with their attendance. One thing that we plan to do in the fall is do a survey for a more global survey for all high school students to get a picture of why kids in general think that attendance could be a barrier or they can share why they're not going to school. So we're going to attempt that in the fall just to see on a more global scale what can get. We can certainly attempt to survey students who have not improved their attendance. We'd be happy to do that. With the timeline left in the school year, I'm not sure if that's possible right now but in the future certainly.

Okay. My questions and feedback are based on data but I want you to run the meeting how you want to run the Okay. I can wait. So

go ahead.

No, I'm good.

No, I'm going go ahead, Alder Jones. Okay.

We're talking about data. Ask questions about data.

And I feel like I need to give some background here. I did not support this originally. And I've watched the other meetings. I want to be proved wrong. 100%. This is not I've made my decision. I'm sticking to it. But I I'm very concerned. I can't even get past this data. I worry that it's I don't want to use the word misleading because I don't think it's intentional, but I worry of, you know, this graph on page oh my gosh, I don't even know how to read the page.

This is one of these. It's when they're able to pick as many as they want, I worry, What is that number one? Are they as worried about this truancy citation, or was that just someone? They're all worried about it. It's not their number one concern. And so I worry about that. I also the direct correlation between absenteeism and failing classes. There's a all of these items can contribute to that. It's not that direct correlation. And that worries me that that's what the data is we're saying and that's what the data is saying.

I'm also concerned by I took notes somewhere. I promise I'm a lot more organized than I see. We won't put one support in place and wait to see. And that's great because we don't have time. You know, we want to support students how we can.

But then we can't use this data because we are using other things. And so I'm also confused by Alder Heffernan says that there's new things, but the older but the items that Heffernan talked about are not new things. So I I feel like I don't know if there's new things or if there's things that we've just been using. The data I don't like the data, and I feel like you've done some really good work, but I don't I don't feel like it's being told as good work. Does that make?

Can you tell us what data you would like to see? Or what would you need to see to either validate that this is improving or it's not, it's helping or it's not? You know, give us some direction there.

Yeah. I think very, very good point. I for example, on that first chronic absenteeism data, Alder Heffernan pointed out that there is kind of those general fluctuations as theirs tends to be. And so in my head, you had put this down showing, hey, look at the great work we're doing. But you also agreed with her that, yeah, those could be fluctuations. We're not happy with that. I I didn't feel like that was shared, that you weren't happy with that. And so

throughout this process, we have always shared chronic absenteeism, habitual truancy, and the combination of the two. So we weren't going to leave this out because that would have been misleading you.

No. I'm We

included the same information throughout the year and a half process. And I did agree with Alder Heffernan that this is not it's not a significant improvement in chronic absenteeism. Now there is an element. Second semester will tell us more because students may already have reached nine days absent before the citation went into place. So that threshold, you know what I mean, it continues.

So what's going to be really important for us is to be able to look at the end of the year and say, Okay, overall, did we have less absences throughout? Because a threshold like a 10%, there's a difference between a student success rate if they miss nine days in the first semester or if they miss fifty days in the first semester. But they both show up as chronically absent. So I mean that's data that we hope tells us more because you're right, this is very broad data. It's just simply saying these are the kids that miss nine or more days.

I was looking at a group of kids today that are missing chronically absent the second semester and I noticed a lot of high school golfers. High school golfers miss eighth hour to start a golf match, and all of those kids are going to be chronically absent. They're not truant, though. So that's why we really focus on the combination of chronically absent, habitually truant, and then academics.

I think I said that wrong. Because I'm not questioning the absenteeism versus habitual truancy. It was more of,

I look

at this data and see general fluctuations. And so I would have loved to have seen, this is what we have and we're not happy with that. Knowing what your stance is on the various things, because I I assume because it's in here and it's going down that you're happy with that. And maybe that's on me. I I shouldn't do that.

I would say that we are not happy with that. Yep. I referenced twenty eighteen, nineteen. Mhmm. I mean, that's really a goal for us. But I don't want to focus on numbers because these are kids. And so it's not that kids are just in school more. It's that they're finding success. And so that's why we include the academic data. And there's going to be different pieces in the academic data that impact that.

Because there's a lot again, every day we come to work and try to do something else maybe a little bit better to help kids be successful. And so if at the end our data isn't showing you enough, so be it. But this is the best we can do for data. We believe it's the combination of chronic absenteeism, habitual truancy and then grades in those outcomes. And we'll be able to show at the end of this second semester.

Now when we get there, you're right, we might see that chronic absenteeism really hasn't improved that much. Has habitual truancy, has the combination, has academic outcomes improved. We think there's a connection there.

Okay. I'm going to go to Alder Meltzer because I haven't heard from him yet and then I see you and I think Alder Heffernan probably has some more and then I have some things myself. Alder Meltzer, what mic are you on? I'm using Patty's. Okay.

All right.

So I feel like the survey does not give me information that I can find really useful. I'd really like to know how many students or like how would the students prioritize the selections that they made given that they were able to select multiple. You know, so I think this is kind of echoing something that the elder Jones said, that, you know, is avoiding a citation their primary reason or is the fact that avoiding a citation should be my primary reason? That's what I was taught in this class. I'm checking this box to show that I got the message from this attendance lesson.

So I think that that, you know, in the future, it would be really great to see maybe have students rank their choices if they can do a multiple choice. I think also the attendance lessons, that are happening can potentially be very impactful. So how do we parse out the impact of those attendance lessons themselves versus the introduction basically of, like, only since only one student has gotten a citation, but all these students are being told I don't wanna say threatened, but all these students are being advised that they need to prioritize avoiding a citation. Is there any way that we can get data that separates out the two? Because one of the things that and I think I have said this in my comments before from when this first came back was that the district is doing some really, really great work and if we have data showing that these other interventions are really great but all that data is lumped together, are we ascribing the successes of these other interventions to the presence of the citation?

That's a big question I have that none of this data gives me any direction about. So that, I think those are my general comments

Thank you. I'm going to come back to do you still have a question?

All

right. Alder Hayden, and then we're going to go to Alder Heffernan.

Yeah. One piece of data I think I would like, I would find interesting, and you kind of started going there, is you you talk about there were 400 more, classes that were passed in the previous semester. I like that kind of data that just kind of shows that success, but I would present it in a different way. I don't wanna know the bulk number of classes that were passed. I would like to know the pass percentage and how that ranks against previous ones because, obviously, you have more people in the school. You could have more classes getting passed and a lower percentage at the same time. So if you can present it that way, that's something I would like to see along with everything that you have right here.

Yeah. Sorry. I did include that. It was 95%. So in the first semester, 95%, just over that. And it's not in a slide, sorry. I just verbalized it. It's in the last It was in a slide from March. So that 95%, just over 95% is the highest percentage we've had in several years. And that is something that we track very carefully and we have that data going back many, many years. Because even the difference between 9593 is a lot of classes when we have 4,500 high school kids times 6.4 classes on average. So it's a significant number.

That's helpful. Thank you. One last question I have is you talked about how long the citation process is taking and you've talked about how there's been one citation so far. So my question would be because of how long it's taken, do we have how many other students would you say are in the pipeline to receive a citation that haven't received it because you haven't kind of got into the sweet spot of how to handle those citations?

So I don't have an exact number for you on who would be because we're trying different interventions before we are considering that. I think, you know, I mentioned I think it was around 50 students who have been referred to the county or who are working with the county, and I think even the county social workers are looking for what more can we be doing. We're not moving the needle on some of these students that we're working with. They're disengaged, they're not on track to graduate, and they're the interventions or supports that we're offering to them and their families. So those would be the kinds of students that I would think would be our next possible option to look at a citation for if nothing else is working.

Thank you.

Gonna Go ahead. I was

just gonna say I'm probably not articulating very well. Those working with kids in our buildings, our social workers, our counselors, they're not thinking about truancy citations. They're not thinking about data and reports to you. They're thinking, like I said, about coming to work every day and figuring out, hey, what do I do to help the student who's sitting in front of me? And that's where they're going to look at all the different options that we have for supports for students.

The attendance lesson is one that is really we think being effective, but it's only effective because we are in meetings talking about truancy citations. And why talking to all students who are chronically absent and habitually truant, because we don't want to wait until they disappear for four months or five months or six months before we start to have this conversation. We want to be more proactive and out in front and say, listen, you're on a path here of missing a lot of school. Eventually, if it becomes where you're not engaged, this is where you could end up. So we're not going to wait until a student disappears for an extended period of time before we talk about this.

And one more thing, there are students who are teams have and I'm talking maybe two or three students at each of the high schools who the attendance teams have said, Hey, do you think we could try a citation with this student because nothing else has worked? But because we're under the parameters of what our agreement between the school district and city council to only cite students who are not engaged or not attending at all. I've told the teams we're not going to consider those students at this time because they are somewhat attending sometimes and somewhat engaged. So those are, you know, a few students at each of the high schools.

Okay. Not seeing I'm going to go to Alder Heffernan now.

So the issue that I have with this data is it doesn't appear to be empirical data. Empirical data starts with a question like, Why aren't you at school more? Or Why are you at school more? What brought that? And even in the way that this was presented, this appears to be data, that had something that wanted to be proved even in the open ended question responses.

There weren't any shared that didn't have something to do with the truancy ordinance. So I feel like this is not empirical data. That's the issue that I have with this. So I'm going to move away from that, and I'm gonna focus more on compliance with the ordinance. And if I may, chair, I have a question for attorney Berwyn. Please. That's alright. Can you tell me what are the powers of a court commissioner? Can they issue a warrant?

Can they? Generally speaking, yes.

Okay. And can they, as an officer of the court, you know, require somebody, you know, with the force of the court behind them to pay a fine or do restitution, those sorts of things?

Yes.

Okay. Similar to how a judge also can do those things? Similar. Okay. So the nuance of not putting a child before a judge versus a court commissioner is kind of a moot point, in my opinion.

If we're still able to move through pretty much the same punitive sorts of consequences for our students. I'm not sure that we can say that this isn't a punitive thing that isn't involving the criminal legal system. So then my I have just two more questions about compliance within the ordinance. So within the ordinance, there's a requirement to maintain a community truancy task force that is collaborating with the districts, the courts, ASD families, and students that reports to the school board. I have had two constituents who have asked to be a member on that board.

And when I have reached out to the school board or anyone else, I have gotten no responses back on how to join if it's happening. And as far as I understood from conversations I had with other school board members that is not happening. So could we have some clarification on that?

Yes. We have an attendance improvement work group, it's called, that is starting up in September. So on the twenty first, I believe it is, there will be a message going out to all families in the district where they'll be able to sign up to be part of the work group. As far as community members go, we're reaching out to different agencies in the city to ask them to be part of the work group.

So then follow-up on that question is that the district is picking who gets to be on this. Like, community members that want to be on this board cannot reach out to you? Or how what is the process? And then also you said it's not until September? Correct. Okay. So it has not been happening during the time that the ordinance has been in place?

We're planning for it to start in September.

So no. Okay. So how would one go about getting, involved with that work group?

When it when the notice is going out in the family letter

Just for the record, can you introduce yourself so when people who are reading the minutes or listening to the transcripts know who's talking.

Thank you. I apologize. My name is Laura Jackson and I work with Appleton Area School District in the Student Services Department. We, as Stephanie Marta explained, it is scheduled to go out in the family newsletter with all of the dates everything in the form that families will use to sign up through LinkedIn there. We will also be posting it on our website as we had in the past so that if there are community members that are not part of the organizations which we have reached out to throughout the community, if they choose to sign up through that method, can they as well.

Those things will happen around the same date.

Okay. Thank you for that clarification. And then my last question is another condition of the ordinance was that the school district was to create an anonymous survey for student and families and a vehicle for the dissemination of that survey to report to the school board. Has that been done?

We've asked for direction from this committee on who specifically are we going to survey and what questions do you want us to ask. And we have not gotten direction. So tonight is direction that we've gotten what the survey would be. So that language was too vague. So at the last meeting in March again, we asked, could you tell us who do you want us to survey?

What do you want us to ask? Again, is it all 4,500 students at the high schools? Is it students who are having chronic absenteeism problems? It's going be hard yet this spring, so we have just three weeks of school left. But we're happy to survey students and families. We just need to know who and what questions you want us to ask.

Absolutely, that's fair. Thank you.

All right, thank you. I don't see anything else. I have a couple of things and I'm so I echo some of the issues of my colleagues with the data is and the thought I kept having as we were looking at this is so if I have a headache and I take a Tylenol and Advil and I'm asked to know which improved my headache more. So I do think that maybe doing some refinement to the survey would be helpful so that again, they've just been through an attendance lesson, so maybe some refinements would be helpful. I would like to try to see that not just the people whose attendance has gotten better.

I'd like to see, you know, so we know who it's working on. I'd like to see why it's not working on those the other people. And I don't have the numbers in front of me. So I'm going to follow kind of Alder Heffernan's trend. I went through and looked at the original because I'm one of the people who was really, really against reinstating this ordinance.

But I listened to teachers and the attendance coordinators very graciously gave me a lot of their time. I met with them. I talked to assistant principals of a couple of different schools. And that, plus in collaboration with Alderson Van Zeeland, we said, Okay, we could do this. And the things that we said were we want a shorter time limit than what was in the original, and we wanted some guide rails on the school.

And we brought the school board into it because the school board is more closely analogous to us. They are answerable to the community. I'm not saying that administration is not answerable to the community because certainly they're answerable to the board. But a couple of the things we wanted in here, we specifically said the task force as well, who answers to the school board, who answers to the community. So a couple of things, so just going through, I obviously understand the citations, the one.

Question on the reporting we'd asked in the resolution that we align with what is reported to the DPI in terms of I understand the citation. When you get a very small sample, you don't want you need to anonymize your data. But I think we've got enough numbers in some of these chronically absent and I mean you're going to have to report this to DPI at the end of this year. So is there a reason we haven't been getting some of these breakdowns?

You saw the breakdown in March. If you look at the documents from our March, we provided the breakdown of the students, the five fifty six students that during the first semester were chronically absent and visually truant.

Okay. So you are keeping track of race, ethnicity, gender, etcetera. Okay, so we did

And you're accurate. We do have to report at the end of the

year. Right.

So it's something that generally we wouldn't be tracking during the year, but we did it at the end of the first semester to be able to report to you.

Because, yeah, I went to the dashboard and I looked and clearly those are done at the end of the year because I was looking at 24 numbers. So we would in any communications that we get, think we would want to see that breakdown. Just in terms of we heard from some community members that there is some concern that things are not being not necessarily applied equally, but maybe not consideration of different circumstances. We also asked for the counseling supervised work programs and community service organizations that were utilized. And then I think an average cost of these.

I looked everywhere on the board website, the district's website. I couldn't get any specific All

of that is pertaining to the court system. So those that information is requested of students that were given citations. With only one student receiving a citation, there isn't any data to share in those areas. So keep in mind that all of those requirements came out of a report that was done before the pandemic when there was truancy court. And so the model that all of those requirements are referring to is no longer in existence. So we'll try our best to comply with them, but a lot of them are going to be not relevant.

Okay. All right. Fair enough. Okay. But so breakdown, I'm going to skip over this next thing because it is the recommendations of the 2018 Trendsi Court Report.

General contact email. And this I think goes along a little bit with the anonymous survey. Is there a way for someone to, without specifically contacting the attendance coordinators directly to provide some kind of feedback or to seek help?

Any email that comes into district pertaining to attendance is going to go to the attendance coordinators.

Okay.

And so when we looked at it, we talked about how do we do this, what do we do, and we just felt like it doesn't make sense to have a separate link that then goes to Stephanie or Stacy who's behind me, Nithka who is our elementary attendance coordinator. So the first thing you'll see on our attendance website is going to be their two email addresses.

Okay. All right. Okay. And then I'm back to the survey. So I think I misunderstood in March that this was the specific thing we were at that you were asking for us for a direction on, and I'm going to kind of to go to my committees.

I think at a bare minimum we should have some sort of, from the website or and I'm asking for help here, but on the website so that a parent concerned person could anonymously report a concern. So I think that would be something are we in agreement that at a bare minimum we'd like to see just a link from the website, and I'm reaching out to other alders in attendance too, where somebody could anonymously report an issue. And maybe we have to work on more specifics about the survey part, but I think anonymous feedback is something that should be reasonably easy to do. Does that make sense? Alder Jones, you have a

I have a question on the survey because I'm seeing the notes from there, and distinctly you have asked for feedback from us. I don't like that we didn't follow-up on that. How do we ensure that we are not the barriers to this process?

So that is a good point. That's that's a good point. And I think we had we were kind of rushed in the the March meeting as we talked about before. And then so yes, I think we do need feedback. But I think at a bare minimum, I would like to see and I hope everybody agrees that we'd like to see just a place where somebody could report an issue.

My only question would be how would we follow-up with somebody who, you know, had an anonymous you know I'm saying? Can this I follow-up?

And what we said that reports to the board, maybe these just gets into the board, that these are issues that the community has noted. That somebody was concerned enough that they went to the website and posted this issue. So maybe they could, any I know we're not taking any action here, but

I know you I know following up is important. But I also worry that if we are to see someone's name that we know from the community, that we know from previous who has caused a stink, are we less likely to listen to them and read it, whether or not we use information. And so I feel like having a link on the website to do anonymous is something that we need to do to allow for those who feel that maybe they wouldn't be heard because of who they are.

So one, thing that we do currently have on our website is Speak Up, Speak Out. And that is anonymous. The tipster who provides information remains anonymous to the school district. They initially are communicating. We also get a notification right away.

And people have used that while it's an excellent excellent source source to to report report a a safety safety concern concern or or bullying bullying or or other things that people want to report. We do get things such as they took a bite of my food at lunch and things like that, you know. We get all kinds of things in there, and that is currently an anonymous tip line. It doesn't say a feedback line and isn't specific to attendance. And we've had community members as well as students and parents utilizing that tip line.

Our current practice with being able to contact the school board through the school board link on the website or the superintendent through the superintendent link on the website. Those processes exist. But to your point, they are not anonymous.

You have a follow-up, Alder Jones?

I mean, where is the tip line? And if I don't have a child in the district, would I know about this? Because it's not on the attendance page or I don't know what it is.

Speak Up, Speak Out has been, like right now I can't tell you that it's still on the front page of the website. It may be, but right now there may be graduation stuff floating through there. So every year, at least at the start of the year and then periodically throughout, we do a push through our newsletters, through our district on the district website, on Facebook pages for schools, we put the Speak Up, Speak Out information on there. So if you're a community member, I think you have to look for it.

I think maybe to avoid any confusion for people who want to put forward something about a tenant specifically, we can certainly add something to the It's not a problem. It would be very easy. My only concern is the follow-up, but if that's not an issue, we can absolutely and then we could add I'm thinking of like a Google form where people don't have to put in their email, but at the end if they'd like to be contacted, they can write their name. That Thank

makes and then I would as we noted, we'd like for those the attendance related ones to somehow get forwarded to the board. Because that's just what I'm reading from the ordinance, the feedback that reports to the board. I have just a couple more questions. I know we're getting late and I appreciate everybody's patience. Most of you have already had a long day. So the new attendance policy. My gut tells me that it's going to make your numbers worse because we're now absent at 08:45 and so how do we account for that?

No. So the only change that's been made that way is for elementary students. So our general cutoff previous to what will happen next year has been students are marked tardy until ten a. M. And then after that it would be either an excused or unexcused absence.

We've moved the tardy time to 08:45. So a student will be marked tardy up until 08:45 and after that will be absent. And that's to align with middle and high school the same way things are done. So there should not be anything worse per se at elementary. Elementary attendance is taken AM and PM, so whether the absence is at 08:45 or 10:00, should actually reduce the number of habitually truant elementary students because unexcused tardies were grouped under habitual truancy and now they'll be tardy similar to what the middle and high schools have. And can

you explain the Okay, right, right. And then I'm going to ask you another question about the new high school policy. Do you want

me to introduce myself? Yes, please. For the record. Elementary attendance coordinator. Did you have a clarifying question specifically about that? I understood

the eight forty five part. I'm assuming charters who start earlier have a similar policy adjusted to their time. Correct. Actually just talked

to a charter school this week and their timing for tardy is currently although they don't start at the exact same time we do, the time is the same up until 10:00, so they're going to adjust theirs. So I want to speak a little bit to what Stephanie was saying about whether our numbers will be worse for elementary. The one thing that will be different is when and this gets really technical, so I don't want to get too much in the weeds, but when a student is marked tardy, those minutes do not count towards their overall attendance numbers. When they're marked absent, even if it's for ten minutes, those minutes will count towards that student's attendance per se. But like what Stephanie said,

we are

not unexcused tardies are no longer going to count towards truancy for elementary. So our habitual truancy numbers for elementary will go down. And with the timing change, it's gonna be a better reflection of what students are actually missing. Because right now, a student could miss an hour and a half of instruction and be tardy. When for us, that is not tardy, that is missing a significant amount of instruction. So this will align more to what we would expect a student to be in school. And we know tardies happen. We run late. It happens. So this allows about seventeen minutes, which is reasonable for what we think.

Okay. Thank you. Yeah, that part was pretty clear, but I am going to go back to Ms. Marta to get a little bit more detail on the new high school policy.

If I could just clarify real quickly. The revisions that were just approved by the board came out of our work last fall. So last fall, the board wanted to include in the policy the six steps that we had to go through as administrators and the attendance team before we would consider a student to be referred for a citation. So back in October, board felt it was important to put that language in our policy. In doing that, the three individuals that work on our policy recognized some out of date language.

So all we did recently was try to update language, but the media looked at it differently and created a different narrative. So really all this was was updating some simple language that really had very little to nothing to do with our high school attendance.

And I read the entire Section four thirty today, so I didn't see anything. But I would like a little clarification on the high school, the change in the high school.

Tell me more because we I'm not sure what you're referring to.

So, the the timing after a certain point they were considered to be

oh, I

I don't have the wording here, but Oh, out of compliance? Out of compliance with that class or

Yeah. So that that's not new. We've had the out of compliance for a while. So So high school students, in the past, probably prior to about three years ago, teachers either marked them present, absent, or tardy, and that was all we had. And what we weren't reflecting was students who maybe come in past that tardy mark of ten minutes, I don't know, say they come in twenty minutes late.

That used to be an unexcused absence, which really isn't reflecting things correctly, because they're in class for part of the time, so they're really not unexcused. So we wanted something that reflected that a student was late, but they were in class for part of the time. Or similarly, students sometimes will leave twenty minutes before class ends, I have to go to the bathroom, they never return. So this is a way for teachers to reflect more of that behavioral situation so that when our attendance teams or when administrators are looking at behavioral issues, they can look and see whether it's tardy, unexcused, or out of compliance. Does that make sense?

That makes sense. Now is out of compliance reported in our chronic It is not. Okay.

Because, again, it's seen more as a behavioral issue rather than attendance thing.

Okay.

Because the student is in class

for some That was very helpful to me. Thank you for that. I just have a couple more questions. So unenrolled on our students who are missing school and failing. So are we talking dropping out? Are we talking transferring to another school? Combination? These

are not students that have dropped out because we wouldn't have that data until after the end of the school year. So these are students who unenrolled either for home based education, a virtual school, or went to a different district.

Okay, okay. So we're not talking about people at this point? No. Okay. Last questions. Okay, so I'm looking at the number of students with a county referral this year.

How

does and I know I have my big chart someplace, but how is that comparing to where we've been in past years? Are we getting more referrals to the county? Are we because people are willing, because of the truancy thing, are willing to cooperate with some other measures or you believe they might and that a referral to the county for help might actually be useful?

So prior to 2018 when truancy court was in place, were a lot less county referrals. And after truancy court was dissolved, that kind of became the only option that our district had. So the numbers really went up then in terms of who number of students being referred to the county. I would say since I've been in this position, this is my fourth year I believe, I would say the referrals have stayed around the same. They haven't increased or decreased significantly, but we're using it pretty similarly between the middle and high schools in terms of an intervention.

I think we have moved towards intervening a little bit earlier with some middle school students who are having significant concerns because we know from the trends that we see that those are continuing into high school. And then for students who are in eleventh grade or approaching 17, were straying away from referring those students because we're not seeing as much of an impact once they get closer to the age of 18 or their senior year.

And my last is really more of a comment. I understand that the logistics of creating this task force are difficult. I would have liked to have seen it in, you know, these seven months, maybe be further along, because we're going to have to make a decision on renewing this ordinance. Just as a comment, I because when you do your end of year statistics, we all see the discrepancy with students of color and economic backgrounds. And I would say that I would want to be really, really careful to make sure that diverse communities are included in this task force.

Again,

that's just a and I see Alder Heffernan, and we are going to let you go home, I promise.

It's just a clarifying question, I swear. When you say, like, refer to the county just for my brain, do you mean, like, through CCS County contracted services or through child welfare? Like, what is the

In Family Services. Oh, you okay. You. Sure. You.

All right. Anybody else?

Can I just ask one? I did. I'm sorry. Hope it's a short answer. But there's just a comment with regards to some of the open ended questions that reverberated and has been sticking with me in regards to the sergeant's explanation around truancy to the students.

And my question was, of these attendance lessons, what amount of time are we maybe focusing on the legal, the truancy piece and that being a consequence of those choices? And what amount of time is maybe talking about putting together proactive plans on how they're going to be getting to school? Just to maybe help me understand what content of those truancy lessons are. Because if what it is is getting people together and talking about the legal repercussions of not choosing this, it's going to be very different in my mind how that could look and might reflect some of the data that we also saw from the students who had engaged. So I was just curious, sorry, before.

That's okay. So I can describe a little bit about how the lesson looks. Typically we start around 09:45 and typically we're done by maybe 10:15 or 10:20. So for the first part of it, usually Superintendent Hartshis is there and talks to the students about how much we care about them and how, you know, end goal is graduation, right? So he makes remarks on that.

And then I talk about the school policies and the state laws around truancy and attendance, just so that students have a good picture of what that looks like. We talk about their infinite campus portal and the importance of checking their own attendance to make sure we know teachers make mistakes. So sometimes a student comes in late and gives the teacher a pass but the teacher had already marked them absent, making sure that teacher went back in to mark them present but tardy. Just things like that. So making sure kids are aware of that portal, talking to them about parents get busy, make sure you remind your parent to call you into school or to complete the parent portal form if you're going to be absent from school.

They might go to work early and forget. So just reminding parents of that kind of thing. And then we have one of our deans of students at each of the high schools just talk about the process when you do become habitually truant. What does that look like in terms of the letter that gets sent home? The meeting that we have with you and your family?

What is the purpose of that, and what are the outcomes we're looking for in terms of coming up with an attendance plan and putting supports or interventions in place. And then after that, we have somebody from Outagamie County Youth and Family Services, which is where we send our truancy referrals. They come in just to talk about the supports that they can provide should a student be referred to the county for truancy. And then finally, the school resource officer has one slide, spends a few minutes talking about what the truancy citation looks like. They're required to have a court appearance, it's not just a ticket that you can pay.

And just a message about this is not what we want to do, nobody wants to give a ticket, and hoping that nobody in the school has to have that done. So it's a short period of time the resource officer speaks and then following that we have every adult who's in the auditorium or in the room come in and come to the front, introduce themselves, what is their role, where can a student find them, and what kind of supports can they provide. And usually, you know, they're making different remarks about why they care about student success. Yeah, so I was just going to say those people are typically administrators. So there's the principal, usually a couple of the associate principals are there, the deans, often the school nurses come.

We have school counselors, school social workers, school psychologists, the school resource officers I mentioned. We have our student support or cultural support specialists who come in and introduce themselves. Our STAR coordinators are often there. Every once in a while, if they're available, our track case managers come in to introduce themselves. Am I missing anybody else?

I think that covers it in terms of the people who are there. And then the last thing that I share is what happens moving forward? I share that nobody in the room is going be getting a citation following the meeting that we're having, that they would always be informed and there would be a process that we'd go through to talk with students and families about that, but that it's in their court. We don't expect perfection, but that we want to see progress. And so our goal is for students to make some sort of positive change around their attendance and tying together that whoever your trusted adult is or maybe one of the adults that came to the front of the room to go to them for support if you have barriers to attendance and if you need some support working on whatever your goal is to make things improve from here.

So that kind of summarizes what the lesson looks like, if that's helpful.

Thank you.

Okay. All right. I don't see anybody else.

On a positive kind of lighter note? Absolutely. You serve a high school student, you're just going to get a lot of answers, right? And so under the other category, my favorite one was one student just simply wrote bug off. I haven't been told that in over thirty years. So I really appreciated hearing again bug off. So anyway, better note there.

At least it was bug. Okay. A couple of other information items. We've got an open after hours, This is empty pockets and cinders and holidays, so we'll expect to see them at the beginning of the meeting soon. Thank you all for coming. I know it was a late night. Special events, I think none of these have actually happened. Looking forward to a lot of these myself. I don't and then going to directors' reports, I don't see anything under any departments. Anybody have anything?

Okay.

Ms. Kutger. Second.

All right. Motion and a second. All in favor? Aye. We are adjourned.