Submitted By: Charles Vreeland, Middle School Coordinator
Independence Public Schools
Independence, MO 64050

Description: The Independence Truancy Initiative began four years ago as a joint effort between the school district and community-based services to respond to the risk factors that are associated with truancy.

Four times a school year (two each semester), a centralized site is set up in the community in which representatives of area community-based services are located and available for consultation with families who have truant children who are “picked up” on that particular day through a truancy sweep conducted by school social workers along with SRO officers. High-absentee students are identified before the truancy sweep day, and those absent from school on the sweep day are brought to the centralized site and their parents are contacted. The student and parent both go through an intake process conducted by a trained social worker, and appropriate referrals are made to available community-based agencies on site. The services regularly available to families include but are not limited to health services, mental health counseling services, Department of Family Services, Drug treatment services, family mediation services, truancy court judge, and homeless services. The initial contact on this day paves the way for setting up ongoing services as needed, and follow-up can then be communicated to truancy court and other needs.

Outcomes: The bottom-line is that the district attendance rate has shown an increase from an attendance rate that was lower than the State of Missouri's, to a current district-wide rate of 95 percent (a significant increase over Missouri's, which has maintained a flat rate). Other benefits are an increase in the use of community-based services by the families who need them most and increased collaborative working relationships among the community agencies and school district.

Challenges: Not all at-risk students are absent on the day of the sweep. While they still receive services either through the school social worker or SRO and through truancy court, they do not get the added motivation provided by the truancy sweep to come to terms with their attendance problems.

However, the experience of the district has been that as time progresses, many families have made the positive turn-around in attendance patterns. This has resulted in at-risk lists becoming shorter, but those families that remain at risk have a whole host of problems taking place in the home environment. Most of the students who are now identified as at risk of truancy are from home environments in which there is drug abuse by one or more family member, mental health issues, or other child abuse and neglect issues. At the beginning of the project the families involved were from a wide spectrum of truancy-related issues; many were easily changed through increased parenting skills, or just awareness of the seriousness of the problem. Now the families have multiple serious problems that require more intense involvement from all resources in the community. The Truancy Initiative has increased our accessibility to these families in their home environments and provided a motivation for change.

A final challenge has been sustainability. Funding for taking care of the needs of the Truancy Initiative has been a testament to the collaborative efforts of many resources. There has not been just one funding mechanism to consistently meet this need. Rather, the experience has been one community partner stepping up to the plate one time and another agency helping out the next. While this has caused much last-minute stress and networking, it has also met the needs of the initiative up to this point. A second sustainability issue is changing priorities of district and/or other agencies (i.e., Police Department). A decline in resources has caused priority changes with the Police Department resulting in fewer personnel assigned to the initiative. The district, seeing attendance problems decrease, has focused on other pressing issues (state testing, safety, etc.), and this has the potential of reducing support for the program over the long term.