A 55-year-old Brookfield man faces the possibility of up to 30 days in jail and/or a fine of $500 is he’s convicted of a rarely invoked law in the Illinois School Code that seeks to punish the parent or guardian of a child who is chronically truant from school.
Riverside police arrested the man Saturday evening at his home and charged him with knowingly allowing his 16-year-old daughter to be persistently truant from Riverside-Brookfield High School. David Sibley, who is the dean at RB, signed the complaint.
Sibley contacted police on Friday, according to police, stating that the girl had missed 53.5 days of school so far this year. School has been in session for 69 days so far this year, according to the calendar posted on the school’s Web site.
While the girl ought to be a junior this year, she has not completed a single credit in three years because she attended school so infrequently. Riverside Police Chief Thomas Weitzel said that the girl’s father had been warned multiple times that he could be charged with a criminal offense if the behavior continued. The man and his daughter have also appeared in Cook County Circuit Court in the past over the issue, Weitzel said.
“The school has made every attempt to work with the student and her father,” Weitzel said. “The arrest was the last resort.”
David Bonnette, the interim superintendent at Riverside-Brookfield High School, said that the path taken by the school in this instance – seeking the criminal complaint against the girl’s father – was “not at all a common issue.”
“We have had some longstanding issues of truancy [in this case], and so as a matter of trying to bring this issue with this particular student to a higher level of concern, the district in consultation with staff did issue the truancy citation with the Riverside police,” Bonnette said.
Bonnette said he has been taking to administrative staff to find a way to flag chronically truant students at an early stage “and begin discussing interventions early on. We tried to do this here, but any attempts have not been successful,” Bonnette said.
“Our focus, and we have talked about this in the last several months, is being able to have the attendance system flag these kids and begin to work on attendance issues early on, so they don’t dig themselves into a rut,” Bonnette said.
The dad is free on bond and has a court date on Jan. 8 at the Maybrook courthouse.