Truancy issue: Half the job is showing up
Yesterday’s Boston Globe ran a full-length article on the issue of chronic truancy in Lowell schools and what one agency is doing to help. The article focused on One Lowell, an immigrant advocacy group here in the city that has been working with our schools to help reduce student truancy. Currently, One Lowell receives about $75,000 from Lowell schools which is funded by the Shannon Grant (a grant, by the way, which is not in the House or Governor’s budgets for next year) to provide support to at-risk students and their families. (Funds from the Shannon Grant also support Lowell police, youth groups, park recreation services, and other school programs geared toward preventing students from getting involved with gangs.)
In Lowell, we have a problem with student attendance. Our rate is higher than the state’s, especially at the high school level, where we have made minimal progress despite a variety of efforts: We have the laptop for seniors program, which rewards those students who have excellent attendance with the possibility of winning a laptop computer at the end of the year. (This program has been successful but its focus tends to be with students who already have decent attendance.) We also have Operation Attendance, where school staff call families at night to inform parents of their child’s excessive absences. We even send uniformed police officers to visit homes of chronically absent children, and we have strengthened our policies regarding attendance as a requirement for receiving class credit. But it seems this problem will not be easily or cheaply solved.
One Lowell has helped tremendously with the students it serves, primarily because of its ability to send bi-lingual staff to work with students and their families. The group’s recent focus on middle school students makes sense as we try to combat these negative behaviors before too much is lost. But with limited resources to attack this complex problem, many of our truant high school students end up as drop outs–and that is a loss for us all.
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