A new campaign sweeping the Uintah Basin aims to encourage students to attend school every day, and it’s driven by high school students.

The teens will be walking city streets, marketing posters designed by students to help spread the word in Daggett, Duchesne and Uintah counties that every day in school matters.

“We’re very excited about this and these kids have done a bang-up job, I’m very impressed with them,” said 8th District Juvenile Court chief probation officer Ray Richards.

“We felt it would be better than having a bunch of old people telling these kids what to do,” Richards added.

In the spring, 30 posters designed by students from Duchesne and Uintah counties were submitted to a contest for a public relations campaign titled “Every Day Matters For a Brighter Future.” The goal of the campaign was to get kids to see the importance of attending school each day.

This summer the Uintah Basin Applied Technology Education Committee chose the top three winning posters. All three of the winners were members of the Class of 2011 from Uintah High School who had been enrolled in the commercial and advertising art class. Jerin Daggett’s poster won first place, followed by Hugh Trotter’s design and Maria Madriz’ poster.

The posters will now be mass produced and placed in store windows and schools in the tri-county area. Other poster submissions will also be used for the campaign for specific entities, such as the Vernal City police and fire departments.

The campaign began with a grant awarded to the tri-county area earlier this year, with additional funds coming from Uintah School District. Since then, Uintah High School’s DECA club has spearheaded the campaign.

“We knew it would be extremely high quality because traditionally (DECA) is just a wonderful club with great kids who do wonderful things,” said Uintah School District Student Services Director Kevin Dickson. “They just have really taken charge of it and have done a great job.”

The campaign is centered on early intervention. DECA club members are planning several ways to help encourage good attendance in Uintah School District elementary schools including: bookmarks with the slogan and logo on them, desktop backgrounds and screen savers with the design for every computer in the district, and possibly recognition banquets and awards for students with good attendance.

In the past year habitual truancy was the fourth most common offense for juveniles in the 8th Judicial District, according to Richards. One in 20 students is truant, he said.

“We see about 1,600 kids in a year, that’s a lot of truancy,” he said. “We hate to deal with truancy, but yet it’s so important because it’s an indicator of criminal behavior.”

Richards said 78 percent of people who end up in prison have a first arrest for school truancy.

“The court’s position is we want them in school,” he said. “If we can get them in, they’re going to learn.”

Uintah DECA adviser Joleen Cottrell said she teaches students that it’s their job to be at school every day and that students’ paychecks are their grades.

“Even if they’re excused, we want everybody to know the importance of showing up,” Dickson said. “Just like showing up to work, you show up to school every day.”

Lori Gillman, Skills USA adviser at Uintah High, said every student who failed her class last year did so because of poor attendance.

Gillman said she learned a lot of statistics on attendance from the poster designs, such as the fact that a sixth grader who is absent once a week in school will have a 75 percent chance of not graduating from high school “because it’s the pattern that they form.”

Dickson agrees saying, “statistically what they find out is students that miss a lot of school in kindergarten, first and second grade actually are the ones that become statistically the students who have truancy problems in high school.”

Educators and court officials believe that a big factor in the success of the new advertising campaign is help from the community.

“Truancy isn’t a juvenile court problem, it isn’t a school problem, it’s a community problem,” Richards said. “A business owner will have a bigger impact in a kid’s life than a juvenile probation officer ever could.

“If communities get behind kids we’ll see a dramatic increase in school attendance and graduations,” he said.