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][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]

I love people like you who believe there should be no negative repercussions of a global pandemic.
Would you have walked into a school to teach in August 2020 before a vaccine came out? Many people refused to send their kids. By March 2021, yes, I agree that schools should have fully reopened but before that is dicey. Are you going to use the pandemic excuse forever? [/quote]

Schools were open throughout the south (which DCUM loves to hate on) for in person school and students fared better attending in person school.

Accept that the extensive multi year closures in the DCUM region significantly hurt students. Require attendance and remedial studies to bring students up to where they should be.

Utilize truancy officers.  Make the parents of truant children attend parenting classes.  [/quote]

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