DATE: Tuesday, August 5, 1997               TAG: 9708050097

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B5   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY MATTHEW BOWERS, STAFF WRITER 

DATELINE: SUFFOLK                           LENGTH:   62 lines

BETTER ATTENDANCE, HIGH PASS RATE AMONG GOALS SET FOR SCHOOL YEAR

Students can't learn if they're not in school, so we'll improve attendance, the School Board said Monday.

Students can't graduate without passing the Literacy Passport Test, so we'll aim for 70 percent passing on their first try in sixth grade, the board said.

All city schools don't need to look and act alike, so we'll encourage principals and teachers to be creative, to find new and better and sometimes different ways of teaching children, members said.

If it's back-to-school time in the stores, that means it's retreat time for the School Board. It's when they take a day to set school-system goals for the coming year.

At the Holiday Inn Suffolk, board members in casual attire adopted as one new goal improving attendance, which, in turn, raises school achievement while lowering truancy and related juvenile-crime problems.

To that end, school administrators and police are working on a joint four-prong program dubbed ``Project Lighthouse.'' It would:

Examine current ways of tracking truants, and look at alternatives to suspending those caught. It defies common sense to keep a child out of school for missing school in the first place, said Melinda J. Boone, coordinator of pupil personnel services and testing.

Set up a hot line for residents, business people, mail carriers, utility workers - anyone out during the day - to call police if they see school-age children on the street on school days.

Have police and school officials patrol ``hot spots'' where truants hang out.

Investigate the ``invisible truants'' - those not out causing trouble but not in school, either.

In addition, the City Council is considering adding school hours to the city curfew laws, to give police authority to enforce school-attendance laws, said Superintendent Joyce H. Trump.

``If we implement this, there will be some people who will get upset about it,'' Trump warned the board.

The daily attendance rate across all grades is 90 percent or higher, but the board wanted to target chronic absentees. It set a goal of having 75 percent of all students absent fewer than 11 days in a school year.

Board member William L. Whitley suggested the goal of a 70-percent passing rate for first-time Literacy Passport Test-takers, with mandatory summer remedial classes for those failing one or more of the three tests of basic math, reading and writing skills.

The board agreed it's an ambitious goal: This past year, only 51 percent of Suffolk sixth-graders passed all three parts, with low writing scores the main downfall. The state average was 68 percent passing all three parts.

Board Chairman Mark A. Croston urged the creativity goal, saying recent nonstop nationwide talk about ``magnet,'' ``model'' and ``charter'' schools made him wonder why Suffolk shouldn't have a school not ``stamped out of the same mold'' as all the others, especially with a new kindergarten school opening this year and a new elementary school opening next year. Hence this goal: ``Explore creative models for learning.''

``Something to show off,'' agreed member Lorraine B. Skeeter.

``At the same time, we should get beyond talking about it and do something about it,'' Croston said. ``I'm talking about, we can do whatever we want to do in our school system.'' KEYWORDS: SUFFOLK SCHOOL BOARD

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