Under California law, children between the ages of six and 18 are required to attend school. Chronic truancy puts students at risk of dropping out of school and San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris notes a strong correlation between high school dropouts and crime. In the past four years, 94 percent of San Francisco’s homicide victims under the age of 25 did not graduate from high school. But now San Francisco is clamping down on its troubling high rates of truancy, using a unique and controversial combination of social service interventions and the threat of prosecution.
San Francisco Unified School District’s (SFUSD’s) truancy rates exceed the statewide average and are worse than Alameda, Contra Costa, Los Angeles and San Diego counties. With the Mission District being one of the neighborhoods with the highest truancy rate, Mayor Gavin Newsom chose the Mission District to launch his new city wide anti-truancy education campaign. Walking down 24th Street on Aug. 24, he encouraged community members to contact the Truancy Assessment and Resource Center (TARC) if they see children on the street during school hours.
TARC is a centralized office where students and their families can address the obstacles that might lead to truancy. Caseworkers assess truants for psychosocial and academic issues and help link students to community resources provided by TARC collaborators like the Department of Children, Youth and their Families; Huckleberry Youth Services and Urban Service YMCA. According to TARC’s director, Tacing Parker, under no circumstances does TARC turn children or their parents over to immigration authorities.
TARC does however work with law enforcement and other authorities, including the Juvenile Probation Department, the Police Department and the San Francisco Unified School District. Parents of truant elementary students can face fines up to $2,500 or a year in jail for not complying with anti-truancy interventions. Kamala Harris maintains that this “carrot and stick” method has been instrumental in lowering truancy rates. In the past two years the number of absences of previously chronic elementary students declined by 33 percent.
Jeff Adachi, public defender of San Fracnsico county, opposes criminalizing the parents of truants. He states, “The focus should be on addressing the root of the problem through social services and needed resources, not criminalizing parents through an already-overburdened criminal justice system.”
Robin Hansen is a national special education examiner and former chairperson of the Community Advisory Committee for Special Education for the SFUSD. Similar to Adachi, Hansen opposes the prosecution of parents of truant students. She feels that schools may indict parents when their children have valid reasons for absences. For example, she knew of a child who was seriously bullied at school yet the school wasn’t dealing with the abuse. The student’s parents couldn’t make their son go to class and the school went after the parents for truancy.
“Immigrants are especially intimidated by accusations of truancy,” Hansen adds. “They fear losing residency, so they will go along with whatever the school says, even if they don’t agree. And often they don’t even understand the charges because the language translation services at SFUSD are very bad.” In addition, most parents cannot afford adequate legal counsel if they are being prosecuted.
Like San Francisco’s policy, SB1317 — a state bill sponsored by District Attorney Harris and State Senator Mark Leno — would make California parents face jail time or a fine if they do not comply with other anti-truancy interventions. Malaika Parker, the director of community action for Justice Matters in Oakland, says that blaming parents for truancy is an inadequate quick fix to the serious problems in California’s schools. She says, “Too much of the school reform discussion is focused on what parents need to do differently instead of looking at the root causes of students’ disengagement from the schools.”
But Julio Moreno, a teacher at Bryant Elementary School, says the policy can serve as a tool. “At Bryant, we communicate with parents of truant kids and try to support them, but having a formal letter of truancy sent to them and meeting with a representative from the District Attorney’s Office to educate them about the policy helps a great deal.”
According to the mayor’s office, prosecuting of truants’ parents only occurs in severe cases. Most of the referrals to TARC are to receive support such as housing, substance abuse services or transportation. Students are not turned away from TARC even if case workers need to adjust their strategy or place the student in a more intensive program. This could include prosecution, but if found guilty, families can choose between paying a fine or regularly attending school and working with TARC to develop a reengagement strategy.
For more information on TARC call 415-437-1700