The Superintendent and the D.A. Speak Out on Truancy

D.A. Kamala Harris and Superintendent Carlos Garcia have written an important op-ed piece in the Chron acknowledging what has been whispered for a long time. Truancy is rampant in SFUSD and concentrated in specific communities.

Absent minded: Consequences of truancy hurt entire community

Kamala D. Harris,Carlos Garcia
Sunday, October 7, 2007

For many of us, the first question asked at the dinner table while growing up often was, "What did you learn in school today?"

The reality is far from that today for many San Francisco children. The reality is that too many of the city's children are failing to get an education, simply because they are not attending school on a regular basis. Chronic school absence is profoundly impacting the future of San Francisco's children as well as the safety of our communities.

We are not talking about playing hooky with friends on a hot day at Ocean Beach. What we are talking about is chronic and habitual school absenteeism - students who have 15, 20, even 80 unexcused absences in one school year.

Although it is a statewide problem, chronic school absence has reached a crisis point in San Francisco. In fact, the city has one of the highest rates in the state - higher than the average rates of California's other major urban areas, including Alameda, Los Angeles and Contra Costa counties.

Last year, nearly 5,500 San Francisco Unified School District students were habitually absent from school. Forty-four percent were elementary school students. At one San Francisco elementary school, 55 percent of the students were chronically or habitually absent last year. One San Francisco third-grader had more than 60 unexcused absences in one school year. One ninth-grader missed 104 days of school last year, out of 180 days. Some students have literally dropped off the charts, having been absent from school for a year or more.

Read the whole thing. It is very encouraging to see both of these leaders standing up and raising awareness of this issue. This is not the first time Harris has spoken out on this issue. About a year ago she and the mayor announced a plan to target 100 individual chronic truants. The article today mentions this and takes credit for a %40 improvement for those students. Sorry, that sounds like a pittance. Only 100 students? Only %40? Nice try, but try again and try harder. Nothing they have done, nothing they are proposing in this article is in any way commensurate with the problem.

Garcia is new. He is promising to lead, and to work with the BOE to target and focus their efforts on key issues. Let's hope this is a signal of more to come. This is a concrete, measurable crisis that should be dealt with. Its hard to impagine a better way to start tackiling the larger issues of minority achievement gaps and graduation rates. The first step has to be to get these at risk kids in class and off the killing streets.