Curtis Gardner is an 11-year-old Chicago fifth-grader who has already lost 186 days of school. That’s right — more than a full year of class time.
Curtis wasn’t enrolled promptly this year at Spencer Elementary Technology Academy because his family couldn’t produce the paperwork — immunization records, birth certificate and a proof of address — needed to show that he was eligible to attend school. The boy spent several lost weeks this fall drifting through his mother’s threadbare apartment or driving around the Austin neighborhood with his mother’s boyfriend.
“I kept telling my mom: I want to go to school; I want to go to school,” Curtis said.
I want to go to school.
No child should have to beg a parent to go to school.
Tribune reporters Gary Marx, David Jackson and Alex Richards found that nearly 32,000 Chicago students in public elementary schools — roughly 1 in 8 students — missed four weeks or more of class during the 2010-11 year. This devastating absenteeism is most acute in the African-American communities on the South and West sides ravaged by gang violence, crippling unemployment and poverty. Children go missing from school for a lot of reasons. Some were enrolled late. Some were pulled out of school early or lost time while transferring between schools. Some were held out of school to act as stand-in parents for younger siblings.
The Tribune investigation — “An empty-desk epidemic” — underscores something that teachers and principals have been telling us for years. Even the best teachers are limited in what they can achieve if a child doesn’t have an attentive parent. Many parents are failing one of their basic responsibilities: to make sure their children go to school.
A teacher can’t teach a child who isn’t in the classroom.
We understand that making a living and raising a family is an enormous, sometimes overwhelming, responsibility. It’s that much more difficult in single-parent households.
Still, chronically failing to get a child to school is a matter of neglect.
Some schools in Illinois effectively use truant officers or social workers to reach chronically truant kids. Chicago Public Schools got rid of truant officers in the 1990s because of budget problems. CPS uses an ineffective robocall system to contact the families of absent children, followed by mailings after the fifth and 10th unexcused absence. There’s also a small pilot program, “Check & Connect,” in which mentors make weekly hourlong visits or calls to about 450 at-risk students in first through seventh grade. A truancy hotline to report a child who isn’t in school is rarely used.
The reporting of Marx, Jackson and Richards suggests better ways to attack this problem.
*Chicago police file a “school absentee report” when they find a child on the streets during school hours. The handwritten reports are sent to CPS, where they get filed, unread. Those reports should prompt the dispatch of a school official to the student’s home.
*Parents who “knowingly and willfully permit” young children to remain truant can be charged with a misdemeanor. They can be brought into Juvenile Court and provided with supervision and counseling, or they can be fined. The Cook County state’s attorney’s office and CPS haven’t aggressively pursued those remedies, the Tribune reports. They need to do more to provide supports and push parents to get kids into school.
*Illinois law can be strengthened to require that kids attend school at age 5, not age 7 as the law now mandates. That change would get some parents sooner into the habit of sending kids to school.
And if all that fails? In 2008, when Education Secretary Arne Duncan was the CEO of Chicago schools, he suggested CPS open as many as six public boarding schools where children from troubled homes would eat, sleep and study in a stable setting. Such schools could be modeled on The SEED School, in Washington, D.C., which started 14 years ago with 40 students. There are now 325 students in grades seven though 12. The structure and discipline work. Proof: 96 percent of all SEED graduates have been accepted to four-year colleges and universities, the school says.
Yes, such boarding schools are expensive. But CPS loses millions of dollars in aid based on attendance when kids don’t go to school.
Ultimately, children pay the biggest price because of their parents’ neglect. They’re consigned to failure.
