Traunts

Keeping Tabs on Truants

Everyday students around California, even the world find excuses not to go to school. Children will lie to their parents saying that they are sick when actually they are completely fine. However, if the parents are smart enough to realize that their child is healthy they still send them to school not knowing that their child can easily walk out of those school gate before the first bell rings. This is called being truant. The L.A. Unified School District (LAUSD) has become aware of these problems that infest high schools and middle schools around their district. There have been reports of many students skipping class and this problem is dominant in lower performing schools and a new type of truancy monitoring system needs to be in place. The district will now keep track of all truants which I believe to be a great idea to stop the problem before it starts. To stop truancies from occurring schools must put in place rules and consequences for skipping school.

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LAUSD has created a program that monitors absences. This is very crucial because students that tend to skip classes usually are the ones that end up dropping out of school. The drop out rate in the LAUSD is officially 24.1% but has been estimated at around double that. Also, after the first month of using the new monitoring system, a single school called Washington Predatory High School near Inglewood had a total of 170 students with ten or more unexcused absences. A few other schools had the same issue. Many schools are very open to the new report system to help seize the issue. John Newton, an assistant principle at Belmont welcomes the report saying, "It should allow us to improve student attendance and track down those students who may drop out because of attendance problems." (Landsberg LA Times C8) This would be a great chance for schools to recognize how much truancy there are and who are committing them. Then when the students are revealed the school will create some kind of initiative for the students to say in school. Doing this will prevent many other truancies for occurring.

Some schools still use the classic way of keeping track of students. Teachers would take attendance in every class and in most schools there are six different classes. This means a teacher needs to keep track of six times the amount of a regular class. "Before, attendance was taken once a day, in homeroom... so we literally have, in a school this size, thousands of attendance marks everyday."(Landsberg LA Times C8) says Newton of Belmont High. This a better way to keep track but can easily have many mistakes. This is why the new report system put in place by LAUSD is going to create a more

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accurate way of keeping track of attendance.

Another school called Bethune Middle School in south LA reported that there were three hundred and thirty five students with three or more truancies. This is far more than any other school in the district. The assistant principle, Beverly Byrd said that the high number of truancies at her school was probably due to the really tough rules on absences. The school was participating in an anti-truency program created and run by the city attorney's office. The program was called Operation Bright Futures. This "operation" would turn every absence into a truancy until the student brought a letter from a doctor saying that it was an excusable absence. This means that the student can only get rid of the truancy mark if he/she went to a doctor. But what if the child