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

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

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[quote=Anonymous]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.[/quote]

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