Truancy In DC HS Is Shocking - Why No Urgency To Address?!!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I work as a case manager in DC. If you want to solve truancy in DC you need to solve the housing crisis.

There are ton of marginally housed kids (mostly with mothers) in DC. They bounce from DC to PG County and back again, often by the week or by the month or even by the day. From an aunt's basement to a friend's couch. Then they don't have cars or transportation so getting to school is hard if not impossible.

I really don't think DCUM has ANY idea of how prevalent this situation is.

You want school stability? House them all with fully subsidized housing. But that is super expensive----$2-4K/month per kid or family unit of kids.

This could account for incremental growth in elementary but not the incredibly high rates in HS …

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I work as a case manager in DC. If you want to solve truancy in DC you need to solve the housing crisis.

There are ton of marginally housed kids (mostly with mothers) in DC. They bounce from DC to PG County and back again, often by the week or by the month or even by the day. From an aunt's basement to a friend's couch. Then they don't have cars or transportation so getting to school is hard if not impossible.

I really don't think DCUM has ANY idea of how prevalent this situation is.

You want school stability? House them all with fully subsidized housing. But that is super expensive----$2-4K/month per kid or family unit of kids.

This could account for incremental growth in elementary but not the incredibly high rates in HS …

huh? by high school you have the cumulative effect of years of housing instability and so many kids who are then behind in school as a result. Many of them drop out by high school or effectively drop out by never attending.
Trust me, it's all connected. Ask anyone who actually works in the trenches of social services, day in and day out.

You house people, you will solve about 95% of DC's problems in a generation. It is the #1, 2, 3 concern of almost every DC resident who lives under the poverty line. It's pretty much the only thing I get asked about every day.
There are the people that you think about as homeless (those who lives in tents) but then an absolute SEA of people who are what we call "marginally housed"----they live with relatives, friends, in unstable rent situations, etc. etc, etc.

DCUM doesn't want to hear about it. No one does. Because it's expensive and it doesn't seem fair (why should I bust my a$$ to pay my mortgage when XYZ gets a $4k housing voucher for free?). But it's the root
of many problems in DC.

Off my soapbox.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It’s wild that DCPS paid 1/2 mil on consultants to address truancy. Seriously wtf.

I agree that the answer is to expel kids who are chronically truant. Let’s make sure the kids who want to go to school have access to education. The other kids can be filtered into an online GED program.

And then renewed the same contract for this year so let's just call it $1 million at this point.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I work as a case manager in DC. If you want to solve truancy in DC you need to solve the housing crisis.

There are ton of marginally housed kids (mostly with mothers) in DC. They bounce from DC to PG County and back again, often by the week or by the month or even by the day. From an aunt's basement to a friend's couch. Then they don't have cars or transportation so getting to school is hard if not impossible.

I really don't think DCUM has ANY idea of how prevalent this situation is.

You want school stability? House them all with fully subsidized housing. But that is super expensive----$2-4K/month per kid or family unit of kids.

This could account for incremental growth in elementary but not the incredibly high rates in HS …

huh? by high school you have the cumulative effect of years of housing instability and so many kids who are then behind in school as a result. Many of them drop out by high school or effectively drop out by never attending.
Trust me, it's all connected. Ask anyone who actually works in the trenches of social services, day in and day out.

You house people, you will solve about 95% of DC's problems in a generation. It is the #1, 2, 3 concern of almost every DC resident who lives under the poverty line. It's pretty much the only thing I get asked about every day.
There are the people that you think about as homeless (those who lives in tents) but then an absolute SEA of people who are what we call "marginally housed"----they live with relatives, friends, in unstable rent situations, etc. etc, etc.

DCUM doesn't want to hear about it. No one does. Because it's expensive and it doesn't seem fair (why should I bust my a$$ to pay my mortgage when XYZ gets a $4k housing voucher for free?). But it's the root
of many problems in DC.

Off my soapbox.

If housing were all it took, there would be very low truancy for residents of public housing and people with section 8 vouchers. I agree that stable housing is important, but there are also a lot of other needed services. And some of it would be really hard to provide...are you going to have a caseworker calling a parent every morning to see if she got out of bed to take her little kid to school? What will the caseworker do if mom says "it's raining, she can stay home?"

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I work as a case manager in DC. If you want to solve truancy in DC you need to solve the housing crisis.

There are ton of marginally housed kids (mostly with mothers) in DC. They bounce from DC to PG County and back again, often by the week or by the month or even by the day. From an aunt's basement to a friend's couch. Then they don't have cars or transportation so getting to school is hard if not impossible.

I really don't think DCUM has ANY idea of how prevalent this situation is.

You want school stability? House them all with fully subsidized housing. But that is super expensive----$2-4K/month per kid or family unit of kids.

This could account for incremental growth in elementary but not the incredibly high rates in HS …

huh? by high school you have the cumulative effect of years of housing instability and so many kids who are then behind in school as a result. Many of them drop out by high school or effectively drop out by never attending.
Trust me, it's all connected. Ask anyone who actually works in the trenches of social services, day in and day out.

You house people, you will solve about 95% of DC's problems in a generation. It is the #1, 2, 3 concern of almost every DC resident who lives under the poverty line. It's pretty much the only thing I get asked about every day.
There are the people that you think about as homeless (those who lives in tents) but then an absolute SEA of people who are what we call "marginally housed"----they live with relatives, friends, in unstable rent situations, etc. etc, etc.

DCUM doesn't want to hear about it. No one does. Because it's expensive and it doesn't seem fair (why should I bust my a$$ to pay my mortgage when XYZ gets a $4k housing voucher for free?). But it's the root
of many problems in DC.

Off my soapbox.

OSSE counted the number of compulsory-aged students who experienced homelessness in 2021-2022 as about 4,500. They use a definition of homelessness which includes staying with friends and family. About 3,000 of those students are at DCPS schools. I have no doubt this drives some of the truancy numbers, but that's about 7% of compulsory-age DCPS students, so it can't come close to explaining these numbers. Even if they massively undercounted.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I work as a case manager in DC. If you want to solve truancy in DC you need to solve the housing crisis.

There are ton of marginally housed kids (mostly with mothers) in DC. They bounce from DC to PG County and back again, often by the week or by the month or even by the day. From an aunt's basement to a friend's couch. Then they don't have cars or transportation so getting to school is hard if not impossible.

I really don't think DCUM has ANY idea of how prevalent this situation is.

You want school stability? House them all with fully subsidized housing. But that is super expensive----$2-4K/month per kid or family unit of kids.

This could account for incremental growth in elementary but not the incredibly high rates in HS …

huh? by high school you have the cumulative effect of years of housing instability and so many kids who are then behind in school as a result. Many of them drop out by high school or effectively drop out by never attending.
Trust me, it's all connected. Ask anyone who actually works in the trenches of social services, day in and day out.

You house people, you will solve about 95% of DC's problems in a generation. It is the #1, 2, 3 concern of almost every DC resident who lives under the poverty line. It's pretty much the only thing I get asked about every day.
There are the people that you think about as homeless (those who lives in tents) but then an absolute SEA of people who are what we call "marginally housed"----they live with relatives, friends, in unstable rent situations, etc. etc, etc.

DCUM doesn't want to hear about it. No one does. Because it's expensive and it doesn't seem fair (why should I bust my a$$ to pay my mortgage when XYZ gets a $4k housing voucher for free?). But it's the root
of many problems in DC.

Off my soapbox.

It doesn't just "seem" unfair -- it is unfair. It's also unworkable. No way the current taxpayers of DC (many with their own challenges in life) are going to fund housing for all the marginally housed of DC + PG County for a generation. We would all move out of DC to protect our own lives and children.

However, pick any run-of-the-mill billionaire. One of them could solve it single-handedly.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Ok, I'll be that person.

These are the consequences of prolonged school closures. The truancy rates and the juvenile crime issues.

If we want to address these issues, we need politicians and policy-makers who are willing to come in and say, out loud: We broke trust and destroyed relationships between schools and families during the Covid closures. We abandoned the kids in the district who most desperately need support from the education system. We need a plan that directly addresses this problem and finds a way to get these kids back into classrooms, back connected with the functional, law-abiding aspects of our community. This will likely require direct family intervention that addresses all aspects of the dysfunction that was made much worse during the pandemic -- mental health, substance abuse, domestic violence, and criminality. We need funding to hire more truancy officers, social workers, and family services counselors and we need to start identifying the kids and families who need serious intervention and doing whatever we can to at LEAST return to pre-Covid numbers.

You can't treat a disease when you refuse to name it. This isn't about schools miscategorizing absences. This is about a broken system that wasn't doing great pre-Covid but absolutely collapsed during school closures. We need to repair it.

I am so angry that no one will talk about these issues with the directness and honesty that is needed. Are we still pretending school closures were just inconveniences for rich white people and actually helped poor communities in the city? Really? After the test scores, the truancy rates, and the juvenile crime stats all make it abundantly clear that the opposite is true?

We messed up. Schools should have reopened in July 2020 (yes, July, the push should have been to get in-person summer school for all at risk kids ASAP and then everyone back in August). It's fine to acknowledge people were scared and that a lot of other cities made a similar mistake. But it WAS a mistake. We need to fix it.

This is one of the several reasons why I realized that the activists and progressives on the Council were just posturing, and don't actually believe anything they say. Every time someone says we should lock up the criminals, these people go, no, that's not the answer, we need to provide services to get at the root of the problem.

OK, but the schools are arguably the greatest service that gets provided to these families. It serves as a childcare, it serves as a place where the kids have activities that will keep them away from crime, it serves as a place to feed the kids with free breakfast and lunch, it serves as a place where professionals can check up on the kids. And our elected officials (and most of the activists) were fine with keeping them closed or partially-closed for a year and a half. Robert White was even recently arguing in favor of more closings. When Ferebee tried to have a very limited reopening in the fall of 2020 that would have targeted at risk kids, the Washington Teachers Union had a walkout, and he backed off. And people were fine with this.

So I don't really want to hear these people spread their fact concern about how they want more resources for these kids to address the root cause of these issues. These people are only all to happy to cut the most important resources for these vulnerable families whenever they feel like, with absolutely no self-reflection.

[Anonymous]

I think there should be a boarding school (local) situation for kids experiencing housing instability. Putting them in a stable, monitored
, consistent environment with a focus on education and extracurriculars would solve many problems, truancy being the tip of the iceberg not to mention hunger, abuse, crime, etc. give these poor kids a chance.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I think there should be a boarding school (local) situation for kids experiencing housing instability. Putting them in a stable, monitored
, consistent environment with a focus on education and extracurriculars would solve many problems, truancy being the tip of the iceberg not to mention hunger, abuse, crime, etc. give these poor kids a chance.

I can’t imagine anyone who would work at that school. Imagine a campus of 1000 feral kids and no parents.

[Anonymous]

Wouldn’t that amount to an orphanage?

I assume there’s no world where we would give them the service required to help, then it would descend from there.

Sadly. People just don’t get that we need to turn these lives around or fear these people’s children for another generation.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I think there should be a boarding school (local) situation for kids experiencing housing instability. Putting them in a stable, monitored
, consistent environment with a focus on education and extracurriculars would solve many problems, truancy being the tip of the iceberg not to mention hunger, abuse, crime, etc. give these poor kids a chance.

You are speaking of something similar to a group home. Kids could get the services and support they needed.

We also used to have alternative schools. Kids would go there instead of Juvie. If a kid was continuously in trouble and disruptive, they were sent there. DC needs both! I don't think FCPS or MCPS has anything similar.

[Anonymous]

There are several public boarding schools in DC. It's very hard to do this well.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/leadership-of-troubled-dc-public-boarding-school-votes-to-close-facility-at-end-of-academic-year/2019/06/05/c98a42aa-86f2-11e9-a870-b9c411dc4312_story.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/dc-charter-school-did-not-do-enough-to-prevent-childs-suicide-family-says-in-lawsuit/2019/01/24/afa6345e-201b-11e9-bc0e-f07c1e4b34fc_story.html

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I would argue that determining an excused versus unexcused absence is not equal across the district. And parents know how to game the system- more than 1.3% of Walls kids miss 20 days of school a year- their parents just know how to get those absences excused.

Do Banneker parents know how to game the system as well or just Walls?
You’re being stupid. Of course, competitive application schools will have a lower truancy rate.

[Anonymous]

These kids are long gone.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:There are several public boarding schools in DC. It's very hard to do this well.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/leadership-of-troubled-dc-public-boarding-school-votes-to-close-facility-at-end-of-academic-year/2019/06/05/c98a42aa-86f2-11e9-a870-b9c411dc4312_story.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/dc-charter-school-did-not-do-enough-to-prevent-childs-suicide-family-says-in-lawsuit/2019/01/24/afa6345e-201b-11e9-bc0e-f07c1e4b34fc_story.html

Very hard to do it well. Too many people assume that just giving a kid housing stability solves all of the problems. Years of instability, especially in early childhood, cause lasting gaps and problems that must be addressed.