May 10, 2010. The Columbus Dispatch.
For at least the past decade, thousands of chronically truant Columbus students have been punished in a counterintuitive way: They’ve been sent home. Last school year alone, the Columbus City Schools suspended students 4,256 times for being truant. By comparison, there were 403 in-school suspensions for truancy.
Superintendent Gene Harris pledged last week to remind principals that they shouldn’t send students home for skipping school. She had been pressured by the social-advocacy group BREAD, which stands for Building Responsibility, Equality and Dignity, to enforce existing district policy.
Harris said she doesn’t think that more than 4,000 students were suspended just for being truant. Being absent without an excuse was likely one of several reasons for the suspension, but the numbers don’t show those nuances, she said. The district is paying close attention to the truancy issue, she said, but chronic truancy is not a widespread problem among Columbus students.
“We have a 94 percent attendance rate. I think that’s pretty swell for an urban district,” Harris said.
Money is tight, and some anti-truancy programs have been scaled back.
But in December 2007, BREAD helped bring an anti-truancy program called Project KEY to six Columbus elementary and middle schools.
After three unexcused absences, parents get a warning letter from the county prosecutor. After five, parents are asked to come in for a mediation session to discover why the child isn’t attending school regularly and make a plan to keep him in school. Last school year, the number of chronically truant students — those with at least 15 unexcused absences in a year — fell 55 percent in participating schools.
“To really effectively intervene, you’ve got to have a relationship. That’s all we’re doing,” said Edwin England, the coordinator for KEY, which stands for Keep Empowering Youth.
Researchers say that KEY has reduced the number of unexcused absences for those who went through mediation last school year, especially among elementary students. Participation was low, though. Of the 1,777 students whose parents were called to attend mediation sessions, 14 percent actually went.
Strategic Research Group, which studied Project KEY’s first full school year last fall, found that 58 percent of the 250 students who sat down with mediators had at least one fewer unexcused absence after their mediation sessions. Thirty-six percent of them had more.
Project KEY places “someone in school to pay attention to what’s going on with the child on a regular basis,” said Melissa Beers, the study’s author. “It doesn’t guarantee that they’re going to be able to fix every problem. But they do seem to be addressing a number of them.”
One of the primary benefits of KEY has been informing parents and students of attendance rules. Sometimes, helping students get to school regularly is a quick fix, such as buying them an alarm clock, the study says.
Audrey Chaney-Ragland said that a mediation session helped get her 13-year-old son, Randy Ragland, on track. WithKEY’s support, she set an earlier bedtime and more structure for Randy. He goes to Indianola Math, Science and Technology Middle School.
“Since then, Randy has done absolutely tremendous,” Chaney-Ragland said. “Now, his focus is so dynamic. It’s unbelievable how Project KEY made a difference.”
Parents, teachers and students who were surveyed think KEY is effective, but the district is still evaluating the $230,000 program, which is funded mostly through Franklin County. BREAD wants Harris to expand it to more schools.
“What we’ve got to do is dig more deeply in the data and really determine if this makes sense for an all-out expansion at this point,” Harris said. “I’m not sure we have the program calibrated exactly right right now.”
The decrease in truant students might have had another effect in KEY schools: more suspensions. One theory, Beers said, is that students who would otherwise be skipping school behaved disruptively.
