There was a time, not so long ago, when the word “truant” evoked humorous Norman Rockwell-like visions of a barefoot kid “gone fishin’ ” as an irate truant officer sneaks up behind him. Those days are gone, and with them the notion that truancy is “cute.”
In fact, it has reached epidemic proportions in Chicago’s high schools, and its effects go well beyond the student who skips school as a matter of course.
Last week, two quite different approaches to tackling truancy were unveiled–one from the Consortium on Chicago School Research and the other from the Chicago Public Schools–and together they offer a salutary guide for getting kids back in school and keeping them there.
The consortium, in a report on how students perceive their schools, found that absenteeism is higher in schools where students think teachers don’t care about them, classrooms are disruptive, parents are not involved in the learning process and the kids are not challenged to work hard.
So, the authors of the study wisely reason, if you create a structured, caring environment where students are challenged, helped and encouraged to learn, then they will show up–and they will stay.
Meanwhile, the school board has launched a sweeping initiative aimed at identifying those students who are chronically absent, notifying their parents and returning them to regular school attendance.
That plan includes a hotline for reporting truant kids and police vans to haul them back to school as well as an automated calling system to notify parents every time a student misses a class.
But perhaps most important is the board’s decision to include a host of other agencies in its anti-truancy drive: the Chicago Housing Authority, the state Department of Public Aid and the juvenile court system, for example.
When kids aren’t getting an education, it’s not just a school problem, it’s a family problem, a legal problem and a community problem, and everybody’s got a stake in solving it.
Though the consortium’s “if you build it, they will come” approach may seem at odds with the school board’s methods, they are complementary, since the point is to get kids back in school and keep them there.
Success in this endeavor is critical, not just for the student but for us all. The teenager hanging out on the corner during school hours is not only cheating himself, he’s costing society a bundle.
Studies have documented that kids who are chronic truants are likely to drop out of school eventually. And even those who don’t drop out are fashioning a bleak future for themselves by squandering the opportunity to learn enough to get a job after graduation.
Kids don’t have to love school, but they shouldn’t hate it, and by high school they should recognize its importance in their lives. Far too many do not.
They leave school–occasionally or permanently–for any number of reasons, but by and large those reasons boil down to this: No one–no parent, teacher or principal–has impressed upon them the importance of showing up. If nobody else cares, why should they?
Just as you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink, you can haul a kid to school but you can’t make him think. The school board’s truancy initiative offers some good plans for getting chronic truants back in the classroom, but after that, principals, teachers and parents must take up the challenge.
