No more skipping on kids who skip
By Derrick DePledge, James Gonser and Kevin Dayton
Advertiser Staff Writers
Bruce Asato • The Honolulu Advertiser
Intelligent and strong-willed, the Kalani High School student has dreams of being a professional athlete.
Steven Ho, right, reassures a student in the School Attendance Program. The Saturday sessions with police are a last effort to keep a truant student out of Family Court.
She has shown some talent in volleyball and basketball, but she is skipping too many of her classes and having trouble getting the grades needed to play.
So on a Saturday morning she's in truancy counseling with her mother at the Honolulu Police Department, one wrong step away from a trip to Family Court.
"She has plenty of excuses not to get to class,'' said her mother, who asked that their names not be used to protect their privacy. "She knows what needs to be done. I hope this works. You just hate to see your child miss out."
Every school day in Hawai'i, more than 11,000 students are absent from class, and while many have legitimate excuses, others are in violation of the law.
No definitive numbers are available on truancy in the state or nation because schools track absences differently, but educators and law-enforcement officials say it is a persistent problem and among the leading indicators that a student will eventually drop out of school or get involved with drugs and alcohol or crime.
Catherine Payne, the principal at Farrington High School, said her school has been able to increase average daily attendance from 84 percent to about 89 percent in recent years, but truancy remains a serious problem.
"We are standing on our heads," Payne said. "We call parents almost daily. The teachers are calling parents. My administrators are going and knocking on doors and bringing kids to school."
Gregory Yamamoto • The Honolulu Advertiser
If it were ever tempting for schools simply to write off missing students and concentrate on the ones who choose to come to class, that is no longer an option. Under the federal No Child Left Behind law, attendance is one
Larry Galiza, 16, phones home from the Teen Center at Kuhio Park Terrace, where he is doing homework. He is repeating the ninth grade at Farrington High because he missed too many classes last year.
factor that determines whether a school is making annual progress on standard proficiency tests, so students who skip school on test days actually can hold back the entire school.
None of Hawai'i's public high schools reached its goals this year under the federal law, and a handful of schools fell short solely because of attendance. The law requires that 95 percent of students across several subgroups, including minority and low-income, participate in the tests, a standard that schools here and across the nation are finding difficult.
At Roosevelt High School, for example, 95 percent of students took the tests, and the students reached academic thresholds in math and reading, but 94 percent of low-income students participated, so the school did not meet its target of 95 percent attendance. The law is intended to get schools to help students who are historically at highest risk of failing, but it also has forced school administrators to pay even more attention to attendance.
During the 2001-2002 school year, just four high schools met the attendance standard, and 28 high schools were at 90 percent or higher, leaving the rest — nearly a third statewide — lagging below.
"Sure, it's frustrating," said Fred Yoshinaga, a vice principal at Roosevelt. "The most important thing is to ensure that students are in class. But it's not only the school, it's the parents, too."
Kevin Dayton • The Honolulu Advertiser
Advertiser reporters visited several schools across the Islands in the past few weeks and asked students, principals, parents, educators, police officers and lawmakers to outline the problem of truancy and suggest potential solutions. Among the findings:
Formerly truant students at Hilo High School, from left, Dovie Toribio-Raymond, 17, Matahi Viritua, 17, and Lokelani Tin-Sing, 16, now get more individualized attention at the Kanakila Learning Center.
• The state Department of Education has general guidelines for schools to follow when students are truant, but schools treat unexcused absences in different ways. Enforcement is not uniform across the state.
Some schools send letters home to parents and require detention, counseling or parent-teacher conferences after a student skips a few classes or school days, and they link attendance to grades. Other schools wait until students miss several days or more before ordering sanctions.
• Leeward and Honolulu district schools usually have the highest numbers of students sent to the School Attendance Program, a joint DOE and Police Department intervention effort that began in 1990 as a gang prevention tool. Last school year, 1,979 students on O'ahu were identified as truant, and 1,074 students were referred to the four-hour Saturday School Attendance Program. But only 626 students actually attended counseling.
This year, citing a lack of results, police canceled evening counseling with students and parents who continued to have truancy issues after going through one of the SAP sessions. The one-on-one talks with police were seen as a last attempt at intervention before students and their parents are sent to Family Court.
• Schools typically wait until truancy is egregious and well-documented — one police officer said student files are usually an inch or two thick — before cases are sent to Family Court.
The state can pursue a truancy petition against students in Family Court, and the court can order further counseling, drug screening or other sanctions. The state also can bring an educational neglect petition against parents, and in the worst cases children can be removed from the home. According to the DOE and the state attorney general's office, about 100 students each school year are referred to Family Court because of truancy.
Parents who regularly fail to get a child to school could be charged with a petty misdemeanor, fined $1,000 and face 30 days in jail.
• The year-round school calendar has made it harder for police to identify students who should be in class.
Beat officers usually know which schools are on break, but so do students, and they often try to fool officers by telling them they attend a school that is off that week. "It makes it easier for them and a lot more difficult for the officer," said Sgt. Ford Ebesugawa of the Honolulu Police Department. "The schools definitely have to take a more active approach."
Police say schools and the courts often give even flagrant truants repeated warnings and second chances, which can undermine messages against truancy.
"For a lot of the younger ones, it's a first-time offense. Just the fact that we pick them up is a deterrent," said Sgt. Robert Fernandez of the Maui Police Department. "The older ones, who know the system already and know nothing's going to happen to them; they don't care.
"Without consequences, there's no deterrent."
Mainland law-enforcement officials have established links between truancy, daytime burglary rates and vandalism, and many counselors and police officers agree that truancy is usually one of the first steps toward juvenile delinquency. Frequent absences also can indicate that a student is having trouble at home, finds it hard to fit in at school or is involved with drugs or alcohol.
Al Nagasako, the principal at Kapolei High School, said students who skip school often hang out at the beach, which doesn't bother him nearly as much as those who get together at someone's house to do drugs. "Truancy is like a red light for all sorts of problems — it could be drugs, abuse or any number of things," he said.
Underlying causes
School factors that contribute to truancy: • Poor academic performance and associated lack of self-esteem. • Lack of personal and educational goals because of a lack of stimulating school-related challenges. • Teacher variables, such as lack of respect for students and neglect of diverse student needs. • Schools' lack of consistency in attendance policy. • Parents unaware or not notified of absences. Home and community factors that contribute to truancy: • Negative role models, such as friends who are truant or in trouble. • Family health or financial concerns that put pressure on students to be absent. • Abuse or neglect. • Teen pregnancy or parenthood. • No family support for education. • Safety problems near home or school.
It's impossible for schools to hold the attention of every student all the time, and some young people rebel against structure and conformity. Students are often being pulled in different directions by their parents, friends and popular culture, and sometimes getting to class on time every day doesn't seem important.
School, home, community can contribute to truancy
Larry Galiza, who lives in Kuhio Park Terrace, a public-housing project, is repeating the ninth grade at Farrington because he missed too many classes last school year. He said he was truant because of fighting and "messing around with bad stuff I was not supposed to be doing."
He didn't go anywhere special, he said, sometimes to the beach or the mall, but mostly hung out at the housing project. He wants to become a lawyer one day and knows that finishing high school is a crucial step toward his future.
Galiza attributes his turnaround to the positive influence of his "straight-A" girlfriend and because he started going to church. "She said, if you really not going to change, I leave you. So I said 'OK,'" he said. "I never go out with any kind of girl like that before."
In single-parent homes or in families where both parents work, older children often have to take on responsibilities from household chores to baby-sitting. "Education is not a priority for some people — many people are just in a survival mode," said Linda Puleloa, the principal at Moloka'i High and Intermediate School.
But some parents have no idea their children are cutting school. "A lot of parents are caught off guard," said Susan Scofield, principal at King Kekaulike High School in Pukalani, Maui. "They leave early for work, and the assumption is that Johnny will go to school. And if nobody from the school contacts them, they don't know."
Payne, at Farrington, said some truant students are transferred to community schools and enroll in adult diploma programs. Others are moved to vocational schools.
"Not everybody can handle the huge high school, and kids fall through the cracks," Payne said. "It's finding a place for every kid and giving them hope. You have to do more than point them in the right direction. You have to put them in your car and take them over there, sometimes take the parent along with them."
Working on solutions
Technically, the DOE does not allow schools to use attendance when judging a student's academic performance, but schools can get waivers, and students who don't show up usually don't do well in class regardless of school rules.
James Schlosser, the principal at Kalaheo High School, said students who have four unexcused absences in a class fail for the quarter. "When the stakes are low, you don't get their attention," he said. "This raises the bar."
At Kaiser High School, where grades also are tied to attendance, school administrators have cracked down on students who are frequently late to class by making them clean up the school during Saturday detention. Students who miss more than 10 days at Waimea High School on Kaua'i are excluded from school activities.
At Roosevelt, Yoshinaga said the school contacts parents when students have a string of unexcused absences, and students typically have to serve lunch or after-school detention, but the school does not link grades to attendance. "We don't want to send kids out of school for something that started because they weren't in school," he said. "What do you do with the kids you fail because of attendance?"
State lawmakers considered a bill last session that would have set new fines and community service for parents who don't get their children to school. Students who missed class repeatedly would have faced detention, a ban on school activities, suspension of their driver's license and monitored curfew or home detention.
Lawmakers eventually condensed the bill into a request that the state Board of Education study truancy statewide, collect data on sex, age and grade level and assess state or national trends. The bill did not pass before the session ended, and state Rep. Maile Shi-
mabukuro, D-45th (Wai'anae, Makaha), the bill's sponsor, said she would likely push it again next session.
"It turned out not to be very popular," Shimabukuro said of the tougher penalties. "But this is a big problem. It's been really hard for schools to keep kids in school."
The University of Hawai'i-Manoa has received grant money in the past five years from the U.S. Department of Justice to study truancy. Researchers have been given about $116,000 a year to build on a previous federal violence and drug-prevention effort in Wai'anae, where truancy has been chronic, and are focusing on early intervention at elementary schools.
"It's not so much the students. It's really the families and getting them to come to school on time," said Linda Victor, principal at Ma'ili Elementary School, which is involved in the project. "We told parents at the beginning of the year that we're going to take a harder look at attendance."
Ma'ili parents who don't respond could soon be sent to counseling sessions with the Hawai'i National Guard. The idea, Victor said, is to instill in children and parents that coming to school every day is essential.
"When your child is not in school," Victor said, "they are not learning."
'Was fun, so, oh well'
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In Hilo on the Big Island, students with a history of truancy recalled unplugging the family phone at the start of each day to block calls from school, or erasing messages left on the family answering machines to avoid being caught.
Skipping school?
Others gave fake home phone numbers at the start of the year so attendance calls were made to a wrong number.
The students all said they began skipping school regularly in the ninth grade. Even getting caught changed nothing, because there was nothing their parents could do to keep them in school, they said.
The former truants were all Hilo High School students now attending school regularly at the Lanakila Learning Center/Ka Pouhana Family Life Center. The learning center provides smaller classes, more individualized attention and a curriculum that is more "hands-on," for students who don't do well on larger campuses.
One teenager, Matahi Viritua, said the faculty and staff cannot keep track of everyone on a crowded high school campus. "You can just turn around and walk out of class, and they probably wouldn't even know," he said.
Lokelani Tin-Sing said she skipped almost all of 10th grade. "Junk, that's why, school," she said. "The teachers just give you the work and expect you to know what you're doing, and they just let you go."
Tin-Sing believes her teachers wrote her off, and eventually she abandoned school. "No need come class," she said. "All the smart kids, the teachers help them, and when we ask for help, they just explain 'em and that's all they do," she said.
As for cutting school, "I knew it wasn't going good, but was fun, so, oh well," she said.
Dale Cordero, Tin-Sing's father, was frustrated when she would ditch school or simply refuse to go. She had always been bright, learned to read at an early age and still enjoys reading novels, he said. He believed — and still believes — that she is college material.
"You drop them off at school, and then they dig out with somebody else after," he said.
Staff writers Suzanne Roig, Jan TenBruggencate, Christie Wilson and Will Hoover contributed to this report. Reach Derrick DePledge at ddepledge@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8084.
