Reply to Truancy and crime -- Wash Post article

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Reply to "Truancy and crime -- Wash Post article "

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]So here is the other issue- are we talking about excused or only unexcused?  Because to only investigate unexcused is truly an equity issue.  There are kids in thr system with 50-60 excused absences.  Their parents (or the kids themselves) know how to play the game to never get reported for truancy.[/quote]

Because they are travelling internationally to see Grandma in Asia?  Or because they are on the West Coast to go to an high-level sports competition?  Or maybe a kid had mono?

Annoying for teachers, and not 'fair,' but these kids' truancy is not setting them on a path to crime.

Also, I am highly skeptical of your 50-60 number.  Very few kids are missing a full 10+ weeks of school, and then the cause is generally medical.[/quote]

+1, you cannot get to that many absences by working the system. We are at an EOTP Title 1 school, and if my kid is out sick for more then 3-4 consecutive days, I will be contacted by the school. I kept her home for extended periods for Covid and for a vocal issue and we had to produce doctors notes explaining the length of absence to get these excused. And that was even with calling in daily and reaching out to the teacher for makeup work, which I'm guessing some kid just trying to work the system would not do.

The bigger issue is that there are no true consequences for chronic truancy. In DCPS, being chronically truant can result in kids being forced to do summer school. Well (1) many of these kids will just be truant from summer school, and (2) for parents of younger kids, getting a summer school spot is a reward, as it functions as childcare and they can continue to take the approach of "my kid is someone else's problem."

In my observation, the chronically truant kids generally have some combination of absentee parents (often very young parents, un or underemployed, many do not have HS diplomas), housing instability, behavioral issues and diagnosed or undiagnosed special needs, home issues such as substance abuse, fighting, malnutrition, etc. The idea that you can fix this by fining the parents or threatening to take kids away or jail the parents? It just fundamentally misunderstands the issue. That would work in middle class parent with a lot to lose. That's not who has the chronically truant kids.[/quote]

I get that. I feel terrible for the kids born to shitty parents. But I think the only way to correct that is to disincentivize these people from having children in the first place. And that would include fines and other legal penalties for the parents - both of them regardless of marital status - for the chronically truant. These "parents" are obviously not up for the task of parenting. But if these terrible parents are paying the costs of their offspring's deviancy and crime, it will send a signal to others to get it together before they have children.

It'll never happen in DC because of race issues. But if you don't address the parenting issue, you'll never fix youth truancy and crime. That is far beyond the scope of teachers and schools. Shitty parents are the fundamental problem. [/quote]

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