OSSE Ed Digest
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Vol. 5, Issue 3
March 2008
Bringing urban P-16 education resources to policymakers, parents, advocates, and district and school staff in the District of Columbia
Research on DC Schools
National Lessons Learned
New Ideas
The Office of the State Superintendent of Education does not endorse the views expressed in the resources and reports contained in the OSSE Ed Digest.
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It has become widely recognized in communities across the country that truancy poses a major threat to student academic success and opportunities for long-term success. While creating an obvious threat to students' academic progress, truant behavior also serves as a strong indicator of other social problems in adulthood. According to the Manual to Combat Truancy, prepared by the U.S. Department of Education, in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Justice, "Truancy is the first sign of trouble; the first indicator that a young person is giving up and losing his or her way. When young people start skipping school, they are telling their parents, school officials and the community at large that they are in trouble and need our help if they are to keep moving forward in life." This issue of the OSSE Ed Digest presents a range of research and information on the effects of truancy and strategies to reduce truancy. This issue is especially relevant to the District of Columbia, as the city is committing collaborative, multi-agency attention and resources to the implementation of conditions and supports to address and reduce the rates of truancy among our students.
Resources
Articles
Reports
Resources
District of Columbia Public and Charter Schools No Child Left Behind Data Reports on Truancy
Articles
The Examiner: Program That Made Philly Parents Into Truant Officers to End (February 19, 2008)
Reports
This report describes Blueprints for Violence Prevention programs that address truancy, school attendance, and/or student achievement concerns, and the evaluation studies that have tracked these programs’ outcomes. Programs become “blueprints” model programs based upon standards of program effectiveness developed by the Center for the Study of the Prevention of Violence at the University of Colorado at Boulder. The programs described here are grouped by setting: school based programs (10), community based programs (3), school and community based programs (3), and programs offered in other settings (2). Each listing includes name of the program, type of program, age of students covered, setting, program goals, program description, study design, study sample, and study outcomes. This report offers conclusions based on results from the 18 programs featured.
In 1995, the Washington Legislature passed a law known as the “Becca Bill.” The Becca Bill addresses several areas of public policy, including those affecting at-risk, runaway, and truant youth. This report describes the evaluation of the truancy provisions in the Becca Bill. In passing the bill, the Legislature recognized that truancy is linked to poor academic performance, dropping out of school, substance abuse, and criminal behavior. The Becca law requires a school to inform a student’s parents of unexcused absences and to meet with the student and parents if unexcused absences continue to accumulate. The school may take legal action in juvenile court when a student has five unexcused absences in a month. If a student has seven unexcused absences in a month, or ten in an academic year, the school district must file a truancy petition in juvenile court. If the truancy continues, the court can take several actions, including ordering a youth to a county detention facility and ordering the parents to perform community service and pay fines. The Institute analyzed whether the truancy provisions of the Becca Bill have had an effect on one of the main goals of the Act: keeping kids in school. Specifically, the researchers examined whether the bill has increased high school enrollment rates. Findings include the following: truancy provisions of the Becca Bill appear to result in a statistically significant increase in high school enrollment. Thus, the bill seems to be achieving one of its intended outcomes: helping to keep youth in high school. The researchers estimate that about 2,664 additional high school students are enrolled today as a result of the Becca Bill. The state spends about $3.5 million a year on the truancy petitions, an amount equal to $1,314 per program success ($3.5 million divided by 2,664 enrolled youth).
The myriad legal and economic issues that surround truancy are intertwined and interdependent. This review paper summarizes these issues. The first section describes school attendance laws, how they are applied, and the most commonly used methods of curbing truancy. Sections two and three discuss legal issues and economic issues respectively. They address issues facing schools, truant youth, parents, community and business, and court and law enforcement. Section three includes a discussion of the costs of ignoring truancy and the benefits of addressing it. Section four discusses types of truancy prevention and reduction programs. It includes a list of best practices, and addresses the importance of monitoring and reporting program results. Section five concludes with recommendations for state lawmakers, schools and school districts, courts, truancy reduction programs, and researchers. Finally, a list of additional resources is provided. Throughout the paper, many examples of successful truancy reduction programs, laws, alternative schools and court structures are included.
This is the final report for Project PACT (Partnering to Assess and Counteract Truancy), a Truancy Reduction Demonstration Project funded by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP), U.S. Department of Justice from March 1999 through August 2005. The project's two primary components were: 1) a multi-agency partnership; and 2) a school-based program. The partnership grew over the years to include the Hawaii Department of the Attorney General, the Hawaii Department of Education, the Hawaii Department of Health, the Hawaii Department of Human Services, the Hawaii Judiciary-Family Court, the Honolulu Police Department-District 8, and the University of Hawaii. Kamaile and Maili elementary schools were sites for the school-based program. The report provides the following information on Project PACT: the goals and objectives, the budget and expenditures, and the accomplishments and successes.
This research brief provides information on school attendance and programs to reduce truancy. It also offers examples of what other states and districts are doing to reduce truancy rates and gives a list of program characteristics that seem to be working to reduce truancy. Lastly, the brief provides a list of online resources and reports on truancy.
When children are not in school they fall behind in learning, but what else happens to them?
Recent evidence suggests that consistent non-attendance leads to academic failure, dropping out, and in many cases, delinquency and later adult crime. Truancy and chronic absence, even in the early grades, is a strong predictor that children and youth may be at risk of a whole host of bad outcomes. While there has been much written about truancy, there has been a large gap about the financial costs and benefits of programs that improve school attendance. This report begins to fill that gap by reporting the costs and the estimated benefits of three truancy reduction programs in Colorado: The Adams County Truancy Reduction Project, the Denver Truancy Reduction Demonstration Project, and Pueblo’s Project Respect. These three programs are of interest both for the diversity and the similarity of their approaches. All three treat truancy as a family problem, and rely on intensive case management intervention with the family. All try to be advocates for the families, and build upon the families’ strengths, rather than take a punitive approach. All make frequent use of referrals to outside agencies, such as health clinics or drug and alcohol rehabilitation providers. Yet each differs markedly in terms of their budget, scope, and where they fit in the larger picture of schools, courts, and youth services. This report shows that the costs of each of the three truancy reduction projects, and each of the three court systems, pale in comparison to the enormous price society pays for high school failure and juvenile delinquency. In light of the benefits of high school graduation, all the approaches to truancy reduction reviewed here likely pay for themselves many times over. It is most likely that the best model includes a court system that works in conjunction with family advocates or case workers, connecting with schools and parents to provide a coherent and consistent approach to reducing truancy in which children are not allowed to slip through the cracks.
School Attendance Initiative. The first 3 years: 1998/99–2000/01 (June 2002)
In Multnomah County the schools, community service agencies, and juvenile justice authorities have come together to address truancy. These groups collaborate to form the School Attendance Initiative (SAI): a family-centered, early intervention, outreach program that assists families and students in jeopardy of truancy re-establish patterns of good attendance. SAI partners recognize that truancy begins with small attendance problems and left unaddressed grows into intractable truancy. These partners come together to address the problem of school non-attendance because they recognize that when students are not in school, it is not just a school problem, not just a student problem—it is a community problem…everyone suffers when students are chronically absent from school. This report reviews key results of SAI program implementation and outcomes for students over the first 3 years of SAI’s operation. Findings include the following. The number of students referred to SAI each year increased by 16.6% over the last 3 years from 4,651 in 1998-99 to 5,422 in 2000-2001; 68% of the students referred in Year 1 of SAI were not re-referred for at least the next 2 years; the number of students contacted has risen each year from 3,341 in Year 1 to 3,850 contacted in Year 3, while the number of outreach staff has remained the same; staff made contact with families more quickly each year: from 37% of families contacted within a week of referral in Year 1 to 57% of families in Year 3; attendance of referred students improved by 11% after intervention by SAI staff; on average, only 4% of referred students were attending school 90% of the time before SAI intervention, but after intervention by SAI staff, 36% of students attended school 90% of the time; the percentage of students meeting math academic standards increased by 112% after SAI intervention.
Truancy has been labeled one of the top ten major problems in this country's schools, negatively affecting the future of youth. This Digest examines some of the ways truancy affects both individuals and society, and identifies factors that may place students at greater risk of becoming truant. Guidelines for creating effective attendance policies are considered, and various responses to the problem are described, with the goal of making it easier for districts to implement policies that work for them.
Each school day, hundreds of thousands of students are missing from their classrooms—many without a bona fide excuse. Left unchecked, truancy is a risk factor for serious juvenile delinquency. Truancy’s impact also extends into the adult years where it has been linked to numerous negative outcomes. Consequently, it is critical to identify strategies that intervene effectively with youth who are chronically truant and that interrupt their progress to delinquency and other negative behaviors by addressing the underlying reasons behind their absence from school. This Bulletin provides an overview of the problem of truancy; describes the correlations of family, school, economic, and student factors with truancy; notes truancy’s role as a predictor of delinquency, including juvenile daytime crime; and tallies truancy’s social and financial impacts.
This report uses a unique set of data that merges individual-level data on young people from the School District of Philadelphia and the city’s social service agencies, including the Department of Public Health, the Department of Human Services, and the Office of Emergency Shelter and Services. This report addresses three central sets of questions: 1. How many students in grades 6 through 12 drop out of Philadelphia’s public schools in a single year and what are the key characteristics of these students? 2. What percentage of 9th graders graduates within four years, five years, or six years of starting high school? What has been the trend in these cohort graduation rates over the past 5 years? What are the trends in cohort graduation rates for males and females and for students of different racial/ethnic backgrounds? 3. Which student characteristics, knowable or potentially knowable by school personnel and agency staff, can identify students as being at high risk of dropping out of high school? The following were found as predictors of dropping out. Attending school less than 80% of the time in 8th grade (that is, missing at least 5 weeks of school) and receiving a failing final grade in mathematics and/or English during 8th grade gave students at least a 75% probability of dropping out of school. Of those 8th graders who attended school less than 80% of the time (that is, missing at least 5 weeks of school), 78% became high school dropouts. Of those 8th graders who failed mathematics and/or English, 77% dropped out of high school. Importantly, gender, race, age, and test scores did not have the strong predictive power of attendance and course failure. The study also found that a second group of dropouts, who were not classified as at-risk in 8th grade, were at-risk 9th graders. These students 1) attended less than 70% of the time during 9th grade, and/or 2) earned fewer than 2 credits during 9th grade, and/or 3) were not promoted to 10th grade on time. A ninth grader with just one of these characteristics (who was not at-risk in 8th grade) had at least a 75% probability of dropping out of school.
Every school day in Colorado more than 70,000 students are out of school. It should be obvious that if students are not in school they are not learning and probably will not achieve academically. While some of this absence is health-related much of it is related to truancy, suspensions, or expulsions. Too many youth are out of school for too long and fall behind in their studies. When students fall behind at school it may be difficult, perhaps impossible to make up lost ground and “catch up”. This leads to further disengagement from school, from teachers and ultimately can lead to serious anti-social behavior like juvenile delinquency. Schools typically discipline students’ misbehavior by excluding them. This sends a message to students, who are often already struggling, that they are in fact not wanted. This “push out” model of discipline tends to make a bad situation worse. Clearly, if students are a threat to others they need to be isolated, but students who exhibit threatening behavior make up only a small fraction of the out of school youth population. Today over 20% of school suspensions across Colorado are for truant behavior. Sending a student home for not coming to school provides little or no intervention to the underlying causes of the absences and is counterproductive to the educational process. A predictable negative cycle of behavior is becoming very clear and requires immediate attention. The cycle begins with early truant behavior that leads to later school suspensions, expulsions, and delinquency. Unexcused absence is the first, best symptom of student problems that lead to poor outcomes. In order to re-engage students, the trajectory that begins with truancy (office referral, suspension, expulsion, dropout, and delinquency) must be broken. Schools must be more aggressive in their efforts to curb and eliminate truancy as the first step in breaking this cycle. This report explores a variety of school attendance issues that predict poor achievement, dropping out, delinquency, and ultimately adult criminality. The good news is that these poor outcomes are preventable for most students at a fairly modest investment. While it makes sense to intervene early, there are positive results gained by turning around expelled youth.
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