Although attendance rates at Evergreen Public Schools are increasing, the district is working with a Washington State University program to further increase the number of students showing up for school.
The new partnership is with the university’s Washington Assessment of the Risks and Needs of Students program for Evergreen’s 2024-25 school year. The program is an online 40-question survey for middle and high school students. The questions address six categories: aggression and defiance, depression and anxiety, substance use, peer deviance, school engagement and family environment.
“The really cool thing about EPS right now is the proactive approach of expanding student services and looking at attendance. That has been at a downfall throughout our entire country since COVID-19,” said Jason Castro, Evergreen’s assistant director of student services. “And we’re already seeing large growth right now, and then we think that with WARNS rolling it out, it’s only going to help us to ultimately get kids in school and be successful.”
In the 2023-24 school year, 61.8 percent of Evergreen students attended 90 percent or more school days, according to the state’s Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction. In 2024, October and November district attendance improved by 6 percent compared with those months in 2023.
Heritage High School, Frontier Middle School, Burton Elementary School and York Elementary School were recognized at the Jan. 14 school board meeting for improving attendance this year compared with the previous school year.
Still, Evergreen’s focus is to reduce chronic absenteeism by 10 percent this school year, Executive Director of Programs and School Performance Heather Fowler said at the meeting.
“We’re doing a good job with it, but the difference with what WARNS will provide is that it will compile all of that student data,” Castro said.
He said each school’s questionnaire is a little different; some have paper copies, others have online surveys. He continued, “We’ll be able to ascertain immediately which categories that students need extra support in.”
“We are required by the state to do some sort of a survey to get to the root of the issue for why the student is chronically absent,” Castro said. “The biggest thing that we are getting at is that we can’t help if we don’t know what the issue is.”
Last week, Evergreen reached out to its schools to start piloting the program, Castro said, but he doesn’t know exactly how it will be used. Looking to the future, one idea is to have each student who is chronically absent take the questionnaire, he said, and another idea is to administer it to every sixth- through 12th-grade student at the beginning of the school year as a baseline.
The WARNS program started in 2008 at the Washington State Center for Court Research and moved to WSU in 2017.
“It’s a tool that schools can use to understand more information about the context of their students, to help have conversations with those students, to try to figure out what’s going on in their life, to help them get reengaged in school,” said Brian French, a WSU regents professor who’s worked with WARNS for about a decade.
The university partners with about 140 public schools around the state. Vancouver and Evergreen are the only school districts in Clark County to use the program so far.
About 15 other organizations, including courts and youth service providers, also use the program to assess individual risks and needs, according to WSU’s WARNS webpage.
“It’s not meant to be any kind of punitive measure or a score that is used to make a decision about someone immediately,” French said. “It gives probably different insights than you might receive if the school was just asking these questions directly. It gives a student a chance to self-report on this.”
