Truancy and crime -- Wash Post article

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Libs don’t believe parents should have any responsibility.

Do they ever hold parents responsible? No.

How would you hold parents responsible? I'm seriously curious and open to ideas. Parents should be responsible, but I'm not sure how best to do it.

Get child welfare involved? As the article says, that was the plan. The Child and Family Services Agency was supposed to investigate, which seems appropriate. But that "child welfare staff [said] parents were skeptical about cooperating with an agency that had the power to pry their children from them ... It’s like the police showing up.” So maybe it would be better to start with school staff?

Would threatening to throw parents in jail work? In a few cases, yes, but again parents would do their best not to help, and mostly kids would be worse off if their parents actually went to jail.

What are the "tough" options that would actually help?

The reporting system was flawed, asking teachers and schools to report kids, in communities that have experienced kids being stripped from families (there is a whole history and trauma here). Neutral parties should look at truancy data and step in. Maybe kids go to technical schools or trade apprenticeships so they can earn money if they don’t want to go the traditional k-12 route plus college. Sometimes kids just can’t keep up with the material and then truly, what is the point of school then.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Libs don’t believe parents should have any responsibility.

Do they ever hold parents responsible? No.

How would you hold parents responsible? I'm seriously curious and open to ideas. Parents should be responsible, but I'm not sure how best to do it.

Get child welfare involved? As the article says, that was the plan. The Child and Family Services Agency was supposed to investigate, which seems appropriate. But that "child welfare staff [said] parents were skeptical about cooperating with an agency that had the power to pry their children from them ... It’s like the police showing up.” So maybe it would be better to start with school staff?

Would threatening to throw parents in jail work? In a few cases, yes, but again parents would do their best not to help, and mostly kids would be worse off if their parents actually went to jail.

What are the "tough" options that would actually help?

The reporting system was flawed, asking teachers and schools to report kids, in communities that have experienced kids being stripped from families (there is a whole history and trauma here). Neutral parties should look at truancy data and step in. Maybe kids go to technical schools or trade apprenticeships so they can earn money if they don’t want to go the traditional k-12 route plus college. Sometimes kids just can’t keep up with the material and then truly, what is the point of school then.

This is the saddest thing I've ever read. The point of public school is to give all kids an opportunity to learn. DC is clearly failing, on so many levels. Lowering standards to "what is the point of school" for these kids makes my heart hurt.

[Anonymous]

I have had a child come to school fewer times this year than I have fingers, and DC has done nothing.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I have had a child come to school fewer times this year than I have fingers, and DC has done nothing.

+1

I have kids with shocking numbers of absences. My administrators don’t do anything, DCPS doesn’t do anything, and it doesn’t seem to matter. Attendance is an absolute joke in this system.

[Anonymous]

OK, so I'm no genius.

How do you actually carrot-and-stick the kids to show up at school? That sounds like the biggest thing.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Libs don’t believe parents should have any responsibility.

Do they ever hold parents responsible? No.

Your faux political divisiveness helps nothing.

Truth hurts. What ever is going on now...apparently does not help either.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OK, so I'm no genius.

How do you actually carrot-and-stick the kids to show up at school? That sounds like the biggest thing.

Family norms and values. No amount of "let's fully fund schools and programs" is going to help.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OK, so I'm no genius.

How do you actually carrot-and-stick the kids to show up at school? That sounds like the biggest thing.

I personally am in favor of parents getting jail time. But I think paying them would work too. $1000 per kid if your child misses less than 10 days a year. Schools only actually care about kids showing up because of how much money they lose by the truancy, well maybe they could share some of that money with families?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OK, so I'm no genius.

How do you actually carrot-and-stick the kids to show up at school? That sounds like the biggest thing.

Honestly, you contact the parents and make sure they understand that they are committing educational neglect. And that they risk losing custody of their children if they continue keeping their kids out of school. And you figure out why it's happening and offer supports (safe passage or clothing or food) if that's what is needed.

The city is so afraid to do that, but the consequence is that completely innocent children and dropping out of school in MIDDLE SCHOOL and have no future laid out in front of them. That is not OK. The kids are obviously much worse off in that case. Watch the video of interviews with kids -- the one who said being a kid means either dying young or dying later. That's seriously the future they are for themselves.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OK, so I'm no genius.

How do you actually carrot-and-stick the kids to show up at school? That sounds like the biggest thing.

You have to show them the actual value of going to school.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OK, so I'm no genius.

How do you actually carrot-and-stick the kids to show up at school? That sounds like the biggest thing.

Family norms and values. No amount of "let's fully fund schools and programs" is going to help.

But what to do if the family is bereft of educational values. School has to be an opportunity for kids that are interested in education even if the parents just don’t care. Programs that get kids away from certain problematic parents as much as possible can only help.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OK, so I'm no genius.

How do you actually carrot-and-stick the kids to show up at school? That sounds like the biggest thing.

Family norms and values. No amount of "let's fully fund schools and programs" is going to help.

But what to do if the family is bereft of educational values. School has to be an opportunity for kids that are interested in education even if the parents just don’t care. Programs that get kids away from certain problematic parents as much as possible can only help.

DC's system is not well set up to support kids whose parents simply don't care about school. In some ways the lottery system makes this worse. Kids are not going to school in their neighborhood school, nor are they going to school WITH neighbor kids, so the community support system disappears because there's no real school community.

Not saying we should get rid of the lottery system -- it exists specifically because so many kids have failing IB schools. But it hasn't necessarily solved the problem for at risk kids. It helps kids at all SES levels with invested caregivers and bad IB schools, because those caregivers will use the lottery to get the kids into better schools. But it may actually hurt the kids who don't have invested caregivers because it complicates the system and disrupts school communities.

I don't know what the answer is. I've interacted with a lot of kids in this position over the years and for me the hardest part is that there is what feels like a point of no return after which I just don't think the schools can pull the kids back in and engage them in a meaningful way to get to a HS diploma. Once a kid has been effectively out of the system (maybe going to school but sporadically and not really participating or learning much while there) for a certain amount of time, it's really hard to reverse that trend. I think this happened to an alarming number of kids during Covid shutdowns and that's what led directly to the 2023 crime spike. But even without shutdowns, it's a constant risk unless we have a way to catch these kids and get them consistently showing up to school before it's too late. If you wait too long, they wind up in the criminal system cycle (catch and release in a downward spiral where each interaction with the law pushes them further from any kind of social productivity, but DC's legal system has virtually no method for pulling them out of the spiral since the official policy is almost always to release these kids with no real consequences) and then your only hope is rehabilitation.

The key should be helping these kids before they commit their first offense, and that means they are showing up to school every day. I honestly don't know how you do it. Many of them simply do not care about school, their families are ambivalent or actively dislike schools as well, and there are few if any people around them to change that narrative.

[Anonymous]

We can hold them accountable through fines.

Missing a lot of school or being extremely tardy is not acceptable.

Money always talks, if parents have to waste their hard earned money because of this they will make sure their child goes to school.

This should also be if parents constantly pick up late.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We can hold them accountable through fines.

Missing a lot of school or being extremely tardy is not acceptable.

Money always talks, if parents have to waste their hard earned money because of this they will make sure their child goes to school.

This should also be if parents constantly pick up late.

How do collect the money?

You think anyone would enforce fines against the poor?

Isn't free breakfast and lunch supposed to be a bit of a draw?

Has it worked out successfully for the programs that promised cash for attendance or grades?

[Anonymous]

Even lottery schools are seeing rising chronic absenteeism, so I don’t really know what the issue is. I know sometimes older students don’t go to school because they have to watch younger siblings, but then why are younger students missing so much school? I would imagine it’s actually harder to have your young child not at school because then you can’t go to work and watching a young child is generally exhausting.