Board approves vendor to locate students who failed to reenroll; district adds attendance management tools

The Jackson Public School District board approved two measures intended to identify and, where feasible, re-enroll students who did not return after the 2023–24 school year.

Deputy administrators described a contract with a vendor that will attempt to locate 887 students on the district’s no-show list from the prior year. Administration said the vendor charges a find-and-enroll fee only when a student is located and re-enrolled and noted that comparable large districts had used the service successfully. The district will provide a list of students who were enrolled in 2023–24 but did not return in 2024–25; the vendor’s work is intended to supplement the district dropout-prevention team’s outreach to students who remain enrolled but have attendance problems.

Doctor Merritt explained the vendor’s scope: it will seek out students who were previously enrolled but did not re-enroll and will be paid per located-and-enrolled pupil. District staff said references from Miami-Dade and Jefferson Parish showed the vendor located several hundred students in each district.

Board members discussed privacy and student-record protections. Merritt said a data‑sharing agreement and legal review were included in the contract package and that district legal counsel reviewed the contract for compliance with federal privacy laws.

Separately, the board approved expansion of the SchoolStatus platform to automate documentation of home visits and case tracking for the dropout‑prevention team. Administration said SchoolStatus will replace a paper-based process for tracking home visits.

Both actions were approved by the board. Administrators said the effort is intended both to improve student safety by determining students’ locations and to prevent erroneous counts of dropouts when students have enrolled elsewhere.

Provenance: Doctor Merritt presented both items and answered board members’ questions.