New Orleans to throw book at students who skip school

New truancy center, staff aim to raise attendance
Saturday, September 08, 2007
By Darran Simon
Staff writer

Starting Monday, New Orleans police will sweep neighborhoods, pick up children skipping school, and ferry them to a new truancy center.

A staff of roughly eight people, including a social worker and counselor in the Recovery School District and intervention and youth advocates from the Orleans Parish Juvenile Court, will work out of the center on the third floor of an Orleans Parish Criminal Sheriff's Office building.

The center and recently hired truant officers are an effort to get children into the state-run recovery district's 34 schools and improve shaky attendance numbers since class started Tuesday. The center will be staffed from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.

The community can also anonymously report truancy on Monday by calling the district at 1 (877) 343-4773.

Children will be taken to the center, and their parent or guardian and school will be notified. If children do not have chronic truancy problems, they will be transported to school. If they are not registered, they will be added to the rolls and then taken to a school.

However, in cases of chronic truancy, a parent or guardian has to pick the child up from the truancy center. If a parent fails to show up, the child will be taken to the Juvenile Bureau.

Truancy law on books

A city of New Orleans truancy ordinance mandates that students attend school and allows police officers to pick up youngsters loitering during school hours. Children who skip school could face Saturday detention and be required to attend an extended day program. Guardians could be hauled before a municipal court judge. The New Orleans district intended to launch its truancy center in about two weeks and hire truancy officers later under a wide effort to lean on groups to provide more of a community presence in schools. But after seeing the dismal attendance in the first week of school, the district decided to quicken the pace of its plans, said district Superintendent Paul Vallas.

"We don't want to wait until January or February to start cracking down on truancy," said Vallas, who established truancy centers when he was schools chief in both Chicago and, most recently, Philadelphia. "We want to be aggressive about improving student attendance."

Ten truancy officers will start Monday. The district hopes to hire as many as 25 before the end of the month. The truancy officers, many of whom are public school students' parents who had already been helping with registration, will work out of schools and start calling and visiting homes Monday, Vallas said.

Skipping school a tradition

Before the flood, sometimes more than a third of the city's roughly 60,000 students would skip the first day. That continues, even though Vallas pushed back the start of school from August to September to buck a trend of students attending class after Labor Day. About 60 percent of the more than 13,000 registered students came to classes Tuesday. Attendance has hovered at about 70 percent since Wednesday as the district continued to register children.

However, attendance numbers may have been skewed by the absence of more than 300 students from Gentilly Terrace Elementary, which will open Monday, and by about 1,800 prekindergarten and kindergarten students who start school Sept. 17, according to the district. The district, which does not have a complete student information system, has been cross-referencing state files with district rosters to see how many children are in charter schools and other school systems, Vallas said. He said the student information system should be complete and in use by the end of October.

Other plans in place

Next week, a letter from Vallas, Orleans Parish Juvenile Court Chief Judge David Bell and Municipal Court Judge Paul Sens will be sent to parents to stress the importance of attending school and outline the consequences.

"Our goal is to have every school-age child in Orleans Parish enrolled in school, actively participating and learning," Bell said.

The Recovery District will also try other intervention methods such as distributing bookmarks with the district's attendance policy and consequences, much as Vallas did as Philadelphia schools chief.

The new truancy center will be on the third floor of the Sidney Zaffuto Human Development Center, 639 S. Rendon St., which also houses a juvenile curfew center. Sheriff Marlin N. Gusman provided the space at the request of New Orleans Police Superintendent Warren Riley.

Today, more than 33,000 students -- the majority in independent charters -- attend 80 public schools, compared to about 56,000 students who attended 128 schools before the storm.

Vallas said police officers will pick up any children they see on the streets, regardless of whether they attend school in the recovery district, at independent public charters or in the Archdiocese of New Orleans.

"The police aren't going to discriminate," Vallas said.

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Darran Simon can be reached at dsimon@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3386.