Chronic Truancy in SFUSD

Kim Knox posted a review of a recent meeting: 2nd Annual "Back to School" Institute for Caregivers and Parents of African-American Students. In her report she presents a table showing the incidence of chronic truancy by grade, including the percentage of those truants who are African American and Hispanic. Being a numbers guy (and an HTML guy) I decided to clean up the table to make it more readable, and to add to the table the total population of each grade and the AA and Hispanic demographics of each grade. A "Chronic Truant" is a student who misses 20 days or more of school.

Here is the resulting table:

Grade	Total Students	Chronic Truants	AA% of Total	AA% of Truants	Hispanic% of Total	Hispanic% of Truants
K	4209	176	12%	45%	26%	25%
01	4074	148	13%	57%	25%	21%
02	4115	115	11%	57%	26%	21%
03	3869	100	12%	62%	25%	19%
04	3900	105	12%	50%	24%	25%
05	4003	81	12%	52%	24%	27%
06	3866	76	13%	53%	22%	21%
07	3986	85	14%	41%	22%	23%
08	4017	87	13%	29%	22%	33%
09	5527	507	14%	33%	26%	38%
10	5225	323	12%	35%	21%	33%
11	4449	211	13%	25%	19%	34%
12	3840	139	9%	24%	15%	27%

The results are pretty startling. At all ages, "chronic truants" are inordinately African American. For Hispanics the truancy problem gets worse in the upper grades. Note that we are not talking about a large group of students, nor a large portion of the AA or Hispanic student body. But the disparity in these numbers is significant, and requires our attention.

This blog has taken note when the Mayor Superintendent and the DA speak out on the truancy problem, or when the DA rolls out an anti-truancy program. It is always encouraging to see the issue discussed by our school leaders and law enforcement officials. But the daunting question remains unanswered: what can we do about it?