Arielle Lugn

Describe what brought you to this research:

​​Students who are chronically soft truant often times 'slip between the cracks' because there are no formal reprimands or consequences for soft truancy. While hard truant students are "SARBed" and therefore held accountable by the district for their poor attendance and punctuality, soft truant students receive no consequences other than a possible counselor phone call home. Although soft truancy is not taken seriously by most school districts, the research team in the present study, including the practicioner parter, recognized the detrimental effects chronic tardiness can have on elementary school students by disrupting their schedule and getting their days off to a bad start. Fot this reason the team decided to target this "at risk" group and to design and implement an intervention that would hopefully better engage these students with learning.

What was your specific research question?

The idea of Morning Alarm was to create a positive and supportive before-school environment for children already at-risk of educational failure and to reinforce their attendance in the program as a small measure of success in engaging with school. There was very little supportive research on the effects of counselor involvement to help decrease the rate of "soft truancy" which was one of the things we were curious about in our action research project.

What are you currently doing as a credentialed practitioner?

I am currently working at a NPS (non-public school) in San Diego for students with diagnosed developmental and emotional disabilities through their IEP (Individualized Educational Plan) as a School Therapist. The action research part of the program at USD was helpful in understanding the importance of evidence based practice, something which I have carried with me through my career working with students with special needs.