Under D.C. law, schools must enter the picture when a student starts accumulating a certain number of unexcused days of classes. And when intervention doesn’t work — warning notices, meetings with parents — schools must refer students ages 5 to 13 with 10 full-day unexcused absences to the D.C. Child and Family Services Agency (CFSA) and students ages 14 to 17 with 15 unexcused absences or more to the Court Social Services Division (CSSD) of D.C. Superior Court and potentially to the D.C. Office of the Attorney General (OAG). (Pardon the alphabet soup, but bureaucracy comes with the territory.)
On Monday, I asked OSSE about the extent to which schools were complying with this legal requirement and sought information about school referrals to CFSA and CSSD, along with subsequent referrals to the OAG’s juvenile section.
Christina Grant, the state schools superintendent, advised via email that no D.C. school had failed to meet its reporting requirements. But she added, “OSSE does not play an intermediary role in this process, per DC law. Schools report this information directly to CFSA, therefore schools or CFSA would be best able to answer this question.” And she signed off: “Per DC law, OSSE does not play a role in making or monitoring referrals from schools to the CSSD, or from CSSD to OAG.”
Nag that I am, I followed up by asking if the state superintendent’s office was interested in knowing about the extent to which the schools, Superior Court social services and the attorney general’s office are responding to absenteeism, given the critical nature of the problem.
Instead, communications director Kathryn Lynch-Morin emailed that chronic absenteeism and chronic truancy data received from schools are reviewed and processed internally, but said the state superintendent’s office lacked authority to oversee court social services or the attorney general. She added, “Rather than add another layer of bureaucracy to this process, OSSE … has focused on providing quality data to shed light on this important topic and convening LEAs [local education agencies] to discuss common challenges and identify and spread best practices for improving school attendance.”
Would that OSSE were a tad more inquisitive.
On the same day the state superintendent’s office was citing its refusal to “add another layer of bureaucracy” to the oversight process, Doug Buchanan, director of media and public relations for the D.C. courts, provided the following in response to my request for information about the court system and chronically absent students: “Various problems arose in the referral process between DCPS [D.C. Public Schools] and CSSD. Most often the issues have been with DCPS indicating numerous referrals were submitted to CSSD that could not be confirmed as being in receipt. CSSD was also concerned with the poor quality of the referrals that were received including a dearth of information, little to no information as to any follow-up with the student and family by the school, also no confirmation within the referral that the student or parent was present or notified of the [legally required school attendance] meeting, and further, no information as to whether the student was even currently enrolled at the school.”
For those reasons, Buchanan said, CSSD had made fewer referral recommendations to the OAG for court action. He said CSSD had convened meetings with DCPS to iron out the problems, and that referrals had improved but remain sparse with information and that CSSD probation officers often must weed out deficient DCPS referrals.
News4 reporter Mark Segraves also dug into chronic school absenteeism and found that of nearly 20,000 eligible chronically truant students ages 5 to 13, only 8,000 were referred to Child and Family Services by the schools. And of the nearly 8,000 chronically truant students age 13 and above eligible for referral from the schools to Superior Court social services, about 50 percent were actually referred. What, pray tell, happened to the rest? They are falling behind in school. Have their problems been resolved? Is dropping out in their future or something even worse?
OSSE looks good on paper. Blessed with a nearly $700 million operating budget, OSSE spends loads of federal and local tax dollars seemingly on every academically related topic known to mankind.
But it doesn’t keep track of children experiencing adversity in their lives?
OSSE’s mission: “We will set high standards, build educator and system capacity to meet those standards, expand educational opportunities for all learners with a focus on those underserved and hold everyone — including ourselves — accountable for results.”
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