Last year, 43 percent of students in the District’s public schools were chronically absent and 37 percent were chronically truant, a statistic that counts unexcused absences alone. These dispiriting figures marked an improvement on the previous school year, showing the devastating toll the covid-19 pandemic took on attendance. And though a midyear attendance report suggests continued progress, a reset is clearly required. Critics say the solution the mayor proposed last week is too punitive, and they’re right that the legal system isn’t the answer to truancy. But at the core of the proposal is more promising than they acknowledge.
Research suggests that there’s no one solution to chronic absenteeism because there’s no single reason kids stop going to school. Rooting out systemic causes would be most effective: making the streets safer; the population healthier; the housing supply greater and so on. Changing the culture at schools, so that kids attend because they want to, is also key. D.C. is trying, but it is hard. The next best thing is addressing troubled students’ individual problems.
D.C. tries to arrange meetings with support teams for every student who passes a certain threshold of days missed. Yet many of those meetings — as many as 25 percent — aren’t happening. At the next absenteeism threshold, fewer than half of cases are referred to child services per protocol. The process is overly cumbersome, and school officials are anxious about ending up on an adversarial footing with their students. This points to a larger issue: Many families regard child services with skepticism, or even fear. The agency’s specialty is spotting educational abuse or neglect, not working with kids and their parents to bring them back to the classroom.
Eventually, at child services’ discretion or if students reach 25 missed days of school, absenteeism cases are supposed to land at the Office of the Attorney General. But the rate at which that happens is also very low. And when cases reach the OAG, they often stop there; prosecutors follow a districtwide policy not to prosecute for “status offenses” such as truancy. The OAG might also send students to a diversion program, but that has happened only for about one-quarter of the 180-or-so cases that have reached the office.
A city study found that prosecuting truancy cases would likely send kids on a path ever deeper into the criminal justice system. This finding matches other research; putting kids or their parents behind bars or even in front of a judge for skipping school tends to do more harm than good. So the mayor’s proposal pushes the OAG to compel students and parents to participate in a diversion program or other programming.
But the ideal approach would stop cases from reaching this point. The mayor’s plan would refer kids early in the process not to child services but to D.C.’s Department of Human Services — whose employees will either connect the families to the resources they need (transportation vouchers, for instance, or reliable access to clean uniforms) or do hands-on work with them to overcome other barriers to better attendance.
Success would depend on good implementation, which is not guaranteed in local government: enough funding to ensure adequate staffing, for example, or close and consistent coordination between any involved agencies and the schools themselves. The District has improved, but not perfected, its collection and publishing of absenteeism data. Every school should be obligated to provide numbers not only on who is missing school but why they’re missing it. And the government should use those numbers to figure out where to direct what types of resources, as well as to evaluate which of the city’s many strategies are really helping reduce truancy rates.
The most alarming finding about D.C.’s absenteeism problem might not be the numbers themselves but the attitude that accompanies them. The mayor’s office conducted a survey last year in which one-third of families said they did not believe it mattered whether their children attended school every day. The task before the city is convincing them, with a firm but not too heavy hand, that they’re wrong.
Credit: Source link
