In one year, the Granger School District went from having truancy issues to the highest attendance rate in Washington, thanks in part to Bellevue’s Joan Wallace and retired Granger educator Janet Wheaton.
The two women first began doing work in the Granger community more than 10 years ago, when Wheaton was principal of the city’s Roosevelt Elementary School.
While the pair were sitting down to a large Thanksgiving feast, Wallace remembers her sister-in-law guiltily remarking that she could hardly eat, because she knew her students probably didn’t have much food on their tables that night.
As she watched the pile of Christmas presents grow under her family’s tree weeks later, Wallace thought of the rural Eastern Washington schools again, and decided she needed to do something.
“It’s just not proper that we have a community where kids don’t have adequate food or supplies less than three hours from a city like Bellevue… It’s just not right,” Wallace said. “I feel like God is telling me this is my job to do.”
Over the next decade, the duo helped provide food, clothing and more through their nonprofit, Friends of Granger. There is even a slush fund that residents can go to for needs not met elsewhere — money for girl scout uniforms, furniture, car repairs, even funeral costs for a handful of local children who have died from disease or in car crashes.
“Nobody has ever abused it. It’s an amazing thing that the community knows it’s there and they never have tried to pull a scam or ask for a handout for something that’s not genuinely in need,” Wallace said.
But their most widespread impact took root last year, when they paired with Heritage University intern Alma Sanchez. Together, they decided to focus more on academics and tackle the district’s poor attendance rates.
“I thought, ‘How are we going to help our kids academically?’ Well, you can’t increase test scores if the kids aren’t in school,” said Wheaton, who was recently recognized along with Wallace and Sanchez with the Innovations in Education Award.
Sanchez and Wheaton put together a pilot program where middle schools students with perfect attendance were given the chance to win a year-end drawing for iPads. During the two school years prior to their program, chronic absenteeism (when a student misses 18 or more days of school annually) was at 14.5 and 13 percent, according to Wheaton.
Last year, that number fell dramatically to 3.6 percent — less than half of the truancy rates in Bellevue, Mercer Island and the Lake Washington school districts (Snoqualmie Valley reported about 1 percent) and far below the state average of 16 percent. That year, they had the highest attendance rate in the state.
Throughout it all, Wallace and Wheaton’s work has always been a collaborative effort with the community, one which Wheaton said has been truly humbling. But both woman say the majority of the credit goes to the dedicated teachers in the Granger School District.
“There’s such a passion among those teachers for those kids. The kids are amazing and so bright. They’re worth the effort,” Wallace said.
