South Cook News

The Bremen High School District 228 Board of Education recently learned about a new method for engaging students.

During the Jan. 17 board meeting, board members heard from Tyler Teaney, a dean at Hillcrest High School, regarding its Active Reengagement Center that uses a program called Five Star Student. The program allows the administration to track student attendance, participation in extracurricular activities and events outside of regular school hours. The program tracks student participation and the frequency with which each student attends events. Last semester, they had 56% of students engage in some sort of after-school activity, and they are hoping that using data from the program will continue to increase numbers and attract new students.

The school has also used the program to create fully digital hall passes for students.

Amy DiForti, assistant principal of Teaching and Learning at Hillcrest High School, discussed more benefits offered by the program.

"The IMC is tracking library attendance," she said. "As you can imagine, we've got a lot of students coming in and out of here all the time. Our counselors have been using it for Career Cluster findings and Strengths Explorer to track which students have completed certain things. Our CORE and SOAR programs are developing a behavior system where we can reward students for doing the right thing in the classroom. And we're looking to eliminate what we currently use, which is a digital I.D. so that we have a one-stop shop for everything. So it's been very successful for us and we look forward to continue to work with the many features that it offers."

Through tracking data, the administration learned that some students were unaware of qualifications to join clubs and organizations. They needed more information on how to join a sport — more specifically, how they could get involved after they thought it was already “too late.” In providing more information to students, they have already increased the number of students involved in clubs and sports by 15%, with a total of 410 active students in the month of January.

The program tracks each student’s attendance at after-school tutoring, basketball games, meetings, etc., and assigns them points. The point totals determine who will receive gifts and special recognition each quarter. Students with the highest point totals each quarter earn prizes such as gift cards.

The students who earned the most points for the second quarter were senior Tierra Henderson (105 points), junior Jonathan Guyton (85 points), sophomore Elysan Gillsipie (100 points) and freshman Nevaeh Butler (105 points).