School districts in the Washington area are revamping their truancy policies in an effort to keep in school the thousands of students for whom attending class simply is too onerous.
In the District, where an estimated 20 percent of all students are truant, a policy passed in late August by the city’s school board includes extending to 25 the number of unexcused absences a student must accumulate before referral to the city’s juvenile-justice authorities. Previously, the threshold was 15 days, but officials said the policy was neither effective nor evenly enforced.
“I don’t want us funneling students with non-criminal issues into the criminal justice system,” said board member Sekou Biddle, explaining that truancy often results from dysfunctional homes or educational problems. “My hope is that the new interventions now in place will address those problems first.”
The number of truants has trended upward over the past several years in each of the metro-area school districts, though recent efforts led to some improvements last year in Montgomery County and Arlington.
In Fairfax County, more than 1,200 students accumulated more than six unexcused absences during the 2007-08 school year, up from just over 600 in 2000, according to records from the Virginia Department of Education. In response, the school district will use a computer program this year to notify parents by phone and e-mail of each skipped class.
Unlike the District’s, Fairfax’s new policy allows for referral to juvenile justice authorities after only seven unexcused absences.
In Montgomery County, chronic truants — defined in Maryland as missing 20 percent of class days without a valid excuse — rose to nearly 1 percent of all students, or about 1,300 overall in 2007-08, leading the schools to redouble their efforts to curb the problem during the past school year. In 2008-09, the number dropped to just over 900 students.
Those efforts included computer-generated warning lists allowing schools to “put interventions in place before a student reaches truant status,” said Steve Zagami, Montgomery’s director of student services.
Prince George’s County started an advertising campaign last fall encouraging adults to call the cops if they spotted truants. The county had the second-highest rate of class cutters in the state — more than 5 percent of all students in 2007-08, and more than 20 percent at some high schools. Anecdotal evidence supports slight improvements last year, but official numbers are not yet available.
D.C. schools’ new tactics, which will apply for the first time to all public schools, including charters, require parents to be called after one unexcused absence. After five infractions in one marking period, the student will be referred to a school-based student support team.
That means Niesha Tolen, 16, should be meeting with someone soon. She skipped the first week of class at Northeast D.C.’s Spingarn Senior High partly because she didn’t have the proper clothes to meet the dress code — blue or khaki pants and a plain top.
“I’ll go next week,” she said, waiting for a bus outside of a Northeast convenience store early Friday afternoon.
The number of students like Tolen is difficult to determine, said Chad Colby, spokesman for D.C.’s Office of the State Superintendent of Education.
“We have truancy data, but we don’t have good data systems, so I don’t know how usable that data is right now,” Colby said. “That’s another issue [the department] is trying to work on.”
