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][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]

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.[/quote]

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