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

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

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]

This is such a dumb take. The kids who are truant aren't the kids of people like you. The "broken trust" didn't cause kids 3 grade levels behind to stop coming to school. Go away.[/quote]

Did you even read the PP? They talk about how a plan to reopen schools just for at risk kids, meaning precisely the population of kids who are truant, was thwarted by a walkout by the WTU.

Do you even realize that it was the schools with the highest numbers of FARMS kids that stayed closed the longest in DC? Schools in Ward 3 and Capitol Hill were able to start offering some form of in-person school for all students by March 2021. The schools with high at-risk percentages might have offered some in person instruction for their neediest students, but if you have a 65% at risk population, this doesn't come close to meeting the needs of these kids. Most students at Title 1 schools in DC did not return to school until August 2021.

When you have a population that is already struggling, and then you take away the ONE resource they feel they can rely on, yes you "break trust." And unlike all the people who vocally argued in favor of keeping school remote, this population doesn't have regular access to internet and quiet, calm indoor spaces in which to do remote school.

I am so tired of people not getting that these problems we are now seeing -- the high truancy rates, especially in middle and high school, the major behavioral problems, and the juvenile crime rates, are ALL related to the fact that many kids in this city were simply left to their own devices for over a year. They did not go to school, not remote school, not in-person school. Many had little to no interaction with adults who offered structure, discipline, or even baseline expectations for behavior. They didn't encounter people who might notice that they seemed hungry, angry, unstable, or unsafe. We're talking about hundred of students in DCPS here. We failed those kids.

And now they are in the wind. They don't come to school, they are not learning, many of them are engaging in everything from petty to violent crime. They will not graduate high school, they will not get jobs, they will not have promising futures. These are kids who were already struggling before Covid and many of them would have gone this route anyway. But we greatly increased the likelihood of this happening and accelerated the process, so instead of it happening when they turned 17 or 19, instead of maybe clinging on long enough to get a high school degree or develop enough academic skills to at least hold down a job, these kids wound up on the street at 12 or 13.

How can you people not see this. Do you honestly think these children successfully attended school on their tablets for a year and a half, dutifully walking over to the public library to use their wifi and do their English and math classes? No, they didn't. The city abandoned them and we are now reaping the consequences of those choices. I understand what the risks would have been to keeping schools open for these students in 2020, and I'm telling you right now it would have been worth it. Masks, testing, outdoor classes, whatever we had to do. It would have been worth it. I don't think we will ever get them back. We're going to be paying of ratios for a generation.[/quote]

What were the comparable truancy rates pre-pandemic?[/quote]

https://osse.dc.gov/sites/default/files/dc/sites/osse/publication/attachments/2019-20%20Attendance%20Report.pdf
[/quote]

Thanks for the link.

Looks like the problem was firmly in place before the pandemic, especially for the schools with the super-high percentages.[/quote]

Yes, and the pandemic made it worse. So you had kids who were chronically truant for years pre-pandemic, and then you closed down their schools for 18 months. I'm not saying that those kids would be flourishing if schools had stayed open during that time. But they would have been accounted for. Their parents would be getting the truancy reports, resource officers would be visiting, they'd be on school's radars and even if they were only in school 10 days a month, they'd be in contact with teachers and administrators and counselors in that time.

But for 18 months, these kid had nothing.

And now they are gone. Do you ever think about these 13 and 14 year old kids who are committing multiple carjackings and muggings? Carrying weapons around? Do you ever ask yourself how it got to that point? Yes there were kids like this before the pandemic. It is worse now. There are more. They are younger. They are angrier and more fatalistic. Some lost family members during the pandemic. Others were in greater contact with family members who were laid off, furloughed, or released from jail during that time, and worse off for it.

I know it's hard for people to wrap their heads around this if you are middle class or UMC and do not know what it's like to live on the edge like this, much less to be the child of people who live on the edge. But this really happened, it's not some fantasy some of us are making up. These kids would not have been getting straight As and joining chess club without school closures, but they would have had SOMETHING.

Even if we're just talking percentages here, it matters. Say you have 100 at risk kids, and before Covid, 50 would have graduated from high school and 20 would have wound up committing crimes and the other 30 would have been borderline. Well thanks to school closures, in that cohort, you might be looking at 10 who graduate high school, 50 committing crimes, and another 40 who are borderline but angrier and with fewer allies or advocates in the school system because they simply were not present.

I can't believe how mad it makes me that we even have to try and convince people that this happened. It's so obvious! Look around! You think privileged white kids in Ward 3 have some mental health issues as the result of Covid and school closures? JFC, I'd like to introduce you to some of the kids I know. Or some of the kids I USED to know before they simply disappeared from the neighborhood in 2020 or 2021.

You are all so freaking naive.[/quote]

Some of us were screaming this three years ago. We were called racist grandma killers who love Donald Trump.[/quote]

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