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

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Truancy is great. More money and smaller class sizes for kids who want to be in school.

Truants need jobs and law enforcement. [/quote]

I think the Mayor, DME, and OSSE have quietly adopted this policy - keep the truant-criminals out of class so kids who want to be there have a better shot at succeeding.

The correlation between the chronically truant and kids who disrupt learning for others is probably close to 1.[/quote]

The problem with this approach is that those truant kids are not out working and earning money, or even just goofing off. They are doing drugs and committing crimes, contributing to other problems that are getting much worse in DC.

In my school district growing up, we had an "alternative school" where you got sent for a variety of reasons including chronic truancy (other reasons would be behavioral issues that disrupted the classroom, or if you had a kid, as the alternative school offered onsite childcare while students were in class as well as parenting classes). Kids who went to the alternative school had to sign attendance contracts and had weekly meetings with a teacher-advisor where they were held accountable for absences (missed classes meant additional work to make up for the missed classwork, as well as service obligations for the school). My best friend's mom was a teacher there.

On the one hand, sending all the kids with the biggest issues to the same school has its challenges, especially regarding behavioral issues. But the alternative school was able to hire more staff to help deal with issues, plus I actually think there were benefits for kids who had issues like housing insecurity or coming from difficult home environments, to be in a place where most people understood those experiences. I had another friend who moved to the alternative school in high school because she got pregnant, and she graduated on time and I think being able to go to school and take her baby to a place where she could take care of her during her breaks in class and have her nearby was honestly better than what the vast majority of adults who live in poverty and have babies experience.

I know DC is uncomfortable with the idea of segregating kids based on things like behavior and truancy, and I also know how schools like this can go wrong because you don't always get responsible oversight and they can quickly become juvenile halls where there's a lot of abuse and other staff issues, since these kids often don't have parents who will look out for them. But it IS possible to offer an alternative track like this and do it well, and I saw firsthand how it can improve outcomes for a population of kids where that's not always possible. The alt school also offered more trade programs than the main high school, and some of the students going through it were able to graduate with credits toward certification programs in things like HVAC repair or medical technician work.

If DC was truly progressive, this is what we'd be trying to do. But DC is fake progressive with a corrupt political infrastructure, so we'll just keep doing stuff that doesn't work suggested by overpaid consultants who, huh weird coincidence, will go on to hire the politicians and government officials who hired them in the first place.

I often hate this city and look forward to leaving.[/quote]

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