The Truancy Reduction Demonstration Project (TRDP) is a small program designed to handle the most intractable attendance problems among Denver Public School middle school students. Its annual budget of just under $54,000 funds one social worker who operates out of the Community Assessment Center in Denver. In addition to her middle school focus, the TRDP social worker has handled a small number of elementary school cases and has followed some of her middle school students into high school. This "Truancy Reduction Demonstration Project" is nested within a much larger effort, also focused on middle school, called the "Truancy Reduction Project (TRP)." The two programs are complimentary, but should not be confused with each other. Although this paper evaluates the costs and benefits of only the TRDP, it will describe the TRP in order to place the program in context.
The truancy reduction efforts in Denver during the 2001-2002 school year had their seeds in the mid-1990s when a committee was formed to study recipients of multiple social services, and to describe a prototype recipient. The name given to this fictitious person was Geraldine Thompson. Among other characteristics, Geraldine had a history of difficulty in school and of attendance problems that compounded those difficulties. Thus, school attendance came to be viewed as a cornerstone of effective social service management. Current truancy reduction efforts are cobbled together from a number of funding sources, and take different forms according to elementary, middle, or high school setting. The TRP money goes to middle and high schools, but not the elementary schools. The backbone of the TRP consists of ten truant officers who serve two middle schools each, 19 catch-up teachers (18 of which work in middle schools and one in a high school), eight social workers (in addition to those already funded by the district), and a Student Attendance Review Board (SARB) that reviews truancy cases that the truant officers and social workers are unable to resolve. In addition, the district pays for attendance clerks in the elementary schools, and the Safe Schools Healthy Students Initiative pays for one elementary school SARB. Social workers, whether paid for by the district or the TRP, spend up to half their time on attendance issues. Funding for these truancy reduction efforts has been cut for the next school year, however; the final shape of the program for the 2002-2003 school year has not yet been determined.
Attendance efforts begin within the school buildings. Responsibility for those efforts varies according to school staffing. Teachers, principals, social workers, attendance clerks and truant officers share the responsibility. Some schools might have a social worker but not an attendance clerk, or have an attendance clerk but not a truant officer, and there are about 40 schools that do not have social workers. If the combined efforts of school staff members are unsuccessful, they select students to send either to a SARB or to court. There are 16 SARBS that serve 19 schools, and one that was formed by special request to serve five elementary schools. SARB members come from a number of government and community agencies including Human Services, Juvenile Diversion, the Police Department, mental health service providers, parents, and non-profit community organizations. They review cases, meet with families, and draw up individualized contracts specifying the student’s, parents’, and school’s responsibilities regarding a child’s attendance problem. A student’s participation in the SARB process is voluntary. SARB resources are inadequate to handle the huge number of truancy cases in Denver. Schools select students they feel will benefit most from SARB intervention – those that have family support and are just beginning to develop patterns of truancy, but who they deem will accept correction and help. The more intractable cases are sent directly to court.
The original idea behind the TRDP was to provide additional support to families who had gone through the SARB process without success. However, the case load has grown so great that some cases are referred to the TRDP social worker without having gone through the SARB. Recently, she has also begun to receive cases that involve more than truancy. The Denver Department of Human Services used to serve all children who were deemed by the court to be "beyond control of parent" – BCOP cases. When Human Services became overwhelmed with cases, they began to reallocate their resources away from these BCOP children. In response, the Community Assessment Centers were formed to provide services to a broader segment of the population than DHS could serve. Since many BCOP children have severe truancy problems, some of them have been added to the TRDP social worker’s case load. She reported that forty percent of the children in her current case load have trouble with more than just truancy.
Although referrals were slow to come in the first year of the TRDP, that has changed, and the social worker now carries a large load. She served 73 students in 1999-2000, 84 in 2000-2001, and 45 in just the fall semester of 2001. The social worker begins with each new student by conducting a needs assessment, always in the child’s home. She uses the opportunity to gather a full family history, including the family’s strengths and weaknesses, and find out what sort of help the family needs in order to get their children to school. Like the Adams County case manager, she makes frequent referrals to an array of community agencies. She has a small budget which she can use to purchase things for the children she serves like school clothes, an alarm clock, or in one case a bicycle for transportation to school. She follows each child extensively for a few months, but there is no official graduation from her program. Once she has a file on a student she continues to monitor them to whatever extent she feels necessary. Likewise, there are no concrete goals for her students other than improved attendance. Having no specific end to her program and no quantifiable goals makes it difficult to count successes or failures. The social worker feels that she is able to help about half the students she serves improve their attendance to an acceptable level. If, after a few months of her intervention, the student makes no improvement in his or her attendance, she refers the case to court.
Concurrent with the initiation of the TRP and the TRDP, court procedures for handling truancy changed substantially. Before the Geraldine Thompson Committee made truancy a focus, schools rarely filed truancy cases in court. When they did, it took six months to a year to get a case into court. Before a concrete plan for improvement could be drawn up, or any social services provided, a student would have to go to court, be ordered back to school, and then be found in contempt of court for not improving attendance. Cases were heard by one of three magistrates who did not always agree in terms of how seriously they viewed the truancy problem. The process took so long that it was viewed as useless by school officials. Detention was an available option for truant children then, and now, but was rarely used. Detention remains a last resort, and a number of programs are in place to minimize the number of children given that sentence.
Now, one magistrate hears almost all the truancy cases. Truancy court is held every Friday to minimize the time that school officials and social service representatives spend waiting in court, and therefore the associated cost. Since there are too many cases to fit into the allotted time, however, spillover cases are heard on other afternoons. This year, two days during Spring Break were devoted to catching up. Hearings can last five minutes for the initial petition, or up to an hour for a trial. About 50 cases are heard every Friday. The court held about 2,000 truancy-related hearings during the 2000-2001 school year. (Since some children return to court multiple times, far fewer than 2,000 students were involved.) A number of people are present at the court hearings: the magistrate, the child and his or her family, the DPS attorney representing the school, an attorney or guardian ad litum (GAL) representing the child, a Department of Human Services social worker, and a Denver Public Schools social worker assigned to the court. (Until recently, the social worker assigned to the child’s school was required to attend the hearings. That led to considerable duplication of effort, as a number of social workers spent hours waiting for their students’ cases to be heard. Now, DPS has one social worker assigned to court; he reviews reports completed by the school social worker, so they do not have to appear.) In special cases other service providers may be present as well. A Spanish language interpreter is available all day, and interpreters for other languages are scheduled as needed. A representative from Project X, a juvenile diversion program, is also in court all day. At the time of a child’s first truancy petition hearing, the Human Services representative does a brief needs assessment. If she deems a full assessment is required, she schedules one for a later date. Her goal is to prevent contempt hearings by connecting the student with whatever services he or she needs to resolve the attendance issue. This is much the same as the goal of the SARBs and the TRDP social worker, but not all children who are sent to court have gone through those programs. She reported that her investigations discover many mental health cases, and the services to which she refers children can prevent charges of dependency and neglect.
A number of official sentencing options are available. They include Project X, which places a child on an ankle monitor and provides tutors, usually for 45 days, and Youth Passages, which is similar to Project X but provides transportation to their own school, generally for a 90-day sentence. Two detention centers, one for boys and one for girls, are available as a last resort, but few children are sent there solely for reasons of truancy. Most children also have other offenses, but data on the offenses is not available.
