Reply to Truancy and crime -- Wash Post article

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][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]

You are not going to disincentivize 15 yr olds from having babies by telling them that in 7 years, they could face a fine if their child is truant at school.

Also, imposing fines on people in poverty is pointless. They won't pay them. So you either have to be willing to jail them for unpaid fines (please note that having a parent in jail/prison is a major at risk factor and is likely to result in more truancy, not less, as kids are shuttled to relatives' homes or in and out of foster care) or they will just rack up fines that never get paid. [/quote]

+1. Having a kid at 15 already has a lot more immediate negative consequences, and it's also not something you do because you have long time horizons for decision-making. [/quote]

PP here and yes, that's exactly it. I work with a lot of tweens/teens in DC who wind up I this position, and what they all have in common is none of them really think that far ahead. For the most part, I don't think they feel they are allowed to. There is a lot of nihilism in this generation of teens in DC. When you talk to kids in elementary school, they will talk about the life they might have as an adult in optimistic terms. An 8 yr old recently told me she wanted to be a hairdresser and get married and have two kids, and I was like "absolutely, that sounds like a great life! Do it!" As the kids get older, you don't hear dreams like that articulated. They become jaded by what they see around them, they develop a DEEP distrust of all authority figures (parents, teachers, counselors, coaches), and they just fold in on themselves. The goal becomes having a good time today. And all of these issues we are talking about here -- truancy, petty crime, violent crime, teen pregnancy -- as well as others we haven't really touched on, especially substance abuse, all flow from that attitude.

If you don't feel anything good lies for you on the other side of adolescence, what is the point of anything except pursuing a party today? Your parents tell you that you're no good. Your mom tells you men are all terrible and unreliable and will run off and to never marry one. Your dad tells you that women are just care about money and will try to trick you into fatherhood and not to trust them. Your grandparents shake their heads at you and your parents. Your neighbors all have their own problems. Your teachers are exhausted and want to help but are trying to protect their own sanity at this point. There are counselors and social workers whose whole job is to try and keep you on track and get through to you, but they've got 100 other kids they are doing that for too.

I've lived in other cities but I've never seen a more critical collision of all of these factors at once as I see among young people in DC, especially young men but the girls aren't thriving either. I think [b]we need aggressive intervention at the tween level [/b]to see if we can prevent (1) teenage pregnancy, (2) substance abuse, and (3) the initial forays into petty crime that seem to rapidly escalate when kids hit 13 or 14.[b] I'd be open to whatever has worked elsewhere[/b]. These kids need help or they are just going to repeat the mistakes their parents made and re-entrench all these same problems.[/quote]

What are these things?

I'm a firm believe that the answers lie in some sort of social intervention (not sloughed off to the schools!!!), but I don't know what those things are.[/quote]

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