[Youth-list] The Truancy Epidemic

[JMRab at aol.com]

     (http://www.courant.com/)    
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The Truancy Epidemic 

Officials In City Struggle To Curb Chronic Absenteeism  

By  RACHEL GOTTLIEB
Courant Staff Writer

May 14 2007

Adriana Reyes  didn't feel safe at Hartford Public High School last year 
after girls beat her  up in a bathroom, so she stopped going to school. She tried 
ninth grade again  this year, but, distracted by drama in her friends' lives, 
she began skipping  school.

By March, she had racked up 28 unexcused absences -- the  equivalent of 
nearly six weeks of school.

Whenever Adriana skips, she has  a lot of company. On an average day, school 
officials estimate, up to 2,000  Hartford children are absent from school 
without excuses -- nearly 10 percent of  total enrollment.

It is one of the key reasons why city schools lag the  state in achievement 
test scores.

Educators, volunteers and police have  stepped up initiatives to get children 
back into school, including truancy  patrols, mentoring programs and 
interventions with parents. They have had  limited success, but even some of those 
efforts are foiled by policies that  clash.

As volunteer mentoring programs expand, school budget cuts are  eliminating 
the jobs of people who track truancy. Police take children off the  streets and 
deliver them to schools, only to have some suspended for skipping  school in 
the first place. Rules that call for referring chronic truants to the  courts 
are enforced irregularly.

And in a city where nearly 400 teenage  girls had babies in 2005, most spots 
in a day-care program at one high school  are taken by children of adults, not 
teen mothers.

Missing  Freshmen

Truancy is most severe among ninth-graders. On an  average day at the city's 
public high schools last year, 17.1 percent of  freshmen were absent without 
excuses.

More alarming,  some educators say, is that nearly 9 percent kindergartners 
also were absent.  Through January of this school year, 6.5 percent of 
kindergartners had been  truant 20 or more days - the equivalent of a month or more of 
 classes.

"That's staggering," said Margie Gillis, senior  scientist at Haskins 
Laboratories, a New Haven research institute specializing  in language and literacy. 
"It has huge implications for reading. Kindergarten is  no longer a play year. 
It used to be: Come to school and learn as you play. We  don't have the 
luxury of doing that anymore."

In a city with one of the  nation's highest child poverty rates, efforts to 
curb truancy are complicated by  a host of complex social problems, some of 
which erode parental supervision. Of  Hartford's 36,000 children, a 
conservatively estimated 6,000 - one in every six  - have at least one parent in prison. 
Most households are headed by struggling,  single mothers.

A truant boy tracked down by police told officers he was  skipping school 
because the blisters on his feet made the walk to school too  painful. He didn't 
own a pair of socks.

Truancy experts cite four main  reasons why Hartford children skip school:

They don't feel safe at  school.

Students who must walk to school think their route is  dangerous.

Other walkers, many without suitable outerwear, find the trek  too arduous on 
very cold or rainy days.

Teenage mothers don't have day  care.

Truancy's link to academic failure is so critical that the state  legislature 
is considering funding truancy programs to five districts whose  dropout 
rates exceed the state average. Hartford could use the help.

By  April, more than one in four Hartford ninth-graders had missed the 
equivalent of  at least four weeks; 14 percent had missed the equivalent of at least 
eight  weeks.

Those numbers underscore a staggering dropout rate: just 29  percent of 
Hartford freshmen graduate. And experts say high school truancy can  be traced back 
to kindergarten.

"The kids who are truant [in high school]  have been truant their whole 
lives," said Kimberly DeSimone, director of  school-based programs for The Village 
for Families & Children, a social  service agency.

Last spring, only 30 percent of Hartford third-graders  were proficient in 
reading; only 29 percent of ninth-graders were reading at  grade level.

A study on Hartford truancy commissioned by the Center for  Children's 
Advocacy, part of the University of Connecticut Law School, found  that academic 
deficiency in high school was consistently linked to poor  attendance in lower 
grades.

And although the pattern of poor attendance  starting in kindergarten and 
poor academic performance through middle school was  evident, "early warning 
signs of future academic difficulty rarely led to a  closer look."

The study examined the records of 91 chronically truant  high school students 
and found:

26 percent showed patterns of absenteeism  as early as kindergarten and first 
grade; one student, by eighth grade, had  missed the equivalent of more than 
two years of school.

84 percent tested  far below their grade levels on Connecticut Mastery Tests 
in grades 4, 6 and  8.

Still, the school district plans to eliminate attendance caseworkers  from 
the elementary schools next year to cut  costs.

Suspensions

In Hartford, school attendance  is further eroded by suspensions, 13,000 of 
which were meted out by principals  last year. The school board has asked 
administrators to develop programs to make  time spent in both in-school and 
out-of-school suspensions  educational.

Meanwhile, the fight against truancy is enlisting  troops from outside the 
school system. Hartford police and children's advocates  are launching programs 
aimed at returning youngsters to school and keeping them  there.

After he was appointed last year, Police Chief Daryl K. Roberts  said getting 
kids back in school was his top priority. But locating hard-to-find  children 
- most of them failing - and returning them to school has had limited  
success.

Of 99 children police had brought back to school by April this  year, about 
half of them now attend regularly, Roberts said.

He has  directed patrol officers to pick up children on the streets and take 
them to  school. Two full-time detectives and two school resource officers are 
assigned  to visit the homes of habitual truants to investigate and point 
families to the  help they need to get kids back in school.

Police are focusing mostly on  elementary and middle school students.

If youngsters learn that school is  optional, Roberts said, then "you think 
work is optional and you think rules are  optional. Getting an education should 
not be optional."

Truancy in  kindergarten is the fault of parents, Roberts said, and under 
state law parents  can be arrested for not sending their children to school. "I 
don't want to  arrest a parent for not sending a child to school, but that is a 
parent's  responsibility, and parents will be held accountable," Roberts  
said.

Making Strides

One volunteer program making strides  is the Truancy Court Prevention 
Project, which monitors attendance, provides  case managers for chronic truants, and 
informal, in-school talks between  students and judges from state courts.

Now in its third year, the project  started with freshmen who had 40 to 45 
absences - the equivalent of eight or  nine weeks. "We found we couldn't turn 
things around with the resources we had,"  said Emily Breon, the project's 
director.

In its second year, the project  focused on students with 20 to 25 absences 
and succeeded in stemming further  truancy. But it failed to help students 
improve academically.

This year,  the project added caseworkers from The Village for Families & 
Children and  expanded to a middle school.

At a recent truancy court session at Quirk  Middle School, Superior Court 
Judge E. Curtissa R. Cofield, looking commanding  in her judge's robe, mixed hugs 
and empathy with instructions. She told some  students to keep an accounting 
of why they missed school and what they did with  their time. She told them to 
join after-school programs.

But some seemed  desperately lost. One boy, whose father is "mostly in jail," 
is afraid to walk  home from school because he was attacked. He is getting 
F's in math and science  and a D in reading. What he enjoys, he said, is playing 
video  games.

Cofield tried to link the boy's success with games to an ability  to 
concentrate.

"Are you at high levels [in games]?" she  asked.

"Yes," he replied.

"To get to those high levels, you have  to invest a lot of time. I want you 
to invest that time in your life. I want you  to be the champion of your life."

Some students in the program continue  to miss lessons, even when they're in 
the classroom. One boy told Cofield that  he sleeps in class because he 
struggles with reading. He skipped science often,  he said, because his teacher hurt 
his feelings by passing out tests to other  students without giving one to 
him.

"I feel like I'm invisible - like a  ghost," he told Cofield. "I feel like 
I'm a nobody."

High school  caseworkers are having trouble helping teenage mothers - many of 
them eager to  get back to school.

Hartford Public High's school-based day care can  accommodate eight babies 
and has a waiting list of 21. That list would be  longer, one caseworker said, 
but when teens hear the number already waiting,  they just give up.

Some slots go to the infants of adults, not to the  babies of teens. And 
rather than increase slots for students' infants, the high  school spends 
resources on a preschool for toddlers - all children of  adults.

Meanwhile, Adriana Reyes is trying to get back on track in  Hartford Public's 
truancy court project. She promised Appellate Court Judge  Douglas S. Lavine 
that she would meet with all her teachers to talk about making  up work she 
missed in her 28 unexcused absences. A couple of days later she was  suspended 
for being in the hall without a pass.

So make that 31 days of  school missed by the end of March. And counting.

Contact Rachel Gottlieb  at rgottlieb at courant.com.  
Copyright 2007, _Hartford Courant_ (http://www.courant.com/)  
 
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