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Beech Grove officials credit ALICE training, SRO lessons and targeted outreach for attendance gains
Summary
Safety drills, ALICE training in every building and increased SRO classroom lessons are part of a broader effort administrators say helped raise district attendance from 89.79% in 2021 to 92.48% as of March 5, 2025; district leaders described new data tools, home visits and early interventions to sustain gains.
Beech Grove City Schools administrators told the board on March 11 that a combination of safety planning and targeted attendance work is paying off and will be expanded next year.
"We have every kid now that knows where a safe spot is to go," Chad Mann, the district's state testing coordinator and safe schools specialist, said as he summarized safety work that began in 2021. Mann described districtwide ALICE training, building-level rally-point drills and detailed reunification plans that were used during a prior chemical incident at the high school.
Mann said the district has formalized safety walks and secured-entry checks each morning, and that building assistant principals complete documented action items after each walk. He also highlighted expanded relationships with school resource officers and classroom lessons led by SROs: "Officer Hartman... Officer Parker and Zoe... Officer Reese... lieutenant Rinks" are teaching age-appropriate safety topics and substance- and behavior-related programming, Mann said, to build rapport between students and officers.
Administrators also linked safety work to attendance improvements. "As of the fifth of, March, 2025, we're 92.48% in attendance," Mann told the board, reporting growth from a corporationwide 89.79% in 2021. He said the district moved from being about 5.6 percentage points below the state average in 2021 to roughly 1.4 points below the state average this school year.
To sustain and improve attendance, Mann said the district is using the state's attendance-tracking software to identify day-level and week-level trends, issuing standardized parent letters at 4, 7, 10 and 18 days of absence, conducting home visits when warranted, and piloting early-intervention outreach beginning in July and August for at-risk students. "We want to identify and address attendance barriers early," he said.
Mann described other operational steps, including a crisis response Google Chat that notifies team members simultaneously about incidents, and a Google Sheet used to track safety-walk findings and action items so facilities or administrators can respond promptly.
Board members praised the assistant principals and staff involved; one trustee said Mann "deserves a ton of credit" for the coordination. The presentation concluded with administrators proposing to expand SRO lessons to one lesson per semester districtwide next year and to continue building a culture of preparedness rather than fear.
The board did not vote on policy changes in the presentation; Mann asked trustees if they had questions and the meeting moved on to agenda business.
