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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@courant.com.
Copyright 2007, Hartford Courant.
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