Truant Officer Comforts Parents, Counsels Pupils in a Personal Approach

The girl had been absent from classes at Memorial Junior High School for 15 days, so guidance aide Lucia Arias showed up at the well-kept Southeast San Diego house after telephone attempts to contact the parents proved fruitless.

No sooner had the school official been invited to sit on the living room couch than the mother burst into tears, placing her head onto the shoulder of Arias as she lamented her inability to keep her 14-year-old ninth-grader from spending time with an older boyfriend rather than going to school.

The mother had even quit her job in an effort to keep closer tabs on the child but to no avail, and she now worried that her two younger children could follow a similar pattern of absences.

Arias asked for the family’s telephone number because the one provided the school by the girl was wrong. She told the mother to call the school any time the daughter was absent, and she gave the mother her home number.

Special Counselor

Back at Memorial later in the day, Arias spoke with the school’s special counselor about sitting down with the girl to find out the underlying problems in her attitude toward school and to arrange a conference with the mother as well.

“I feel bad for the mother,” Arias said. “I try not to get too involved in (these cases), but sometimes these people don’t have anyone to turn to.”

Such is the daily world of Arias, who serves Memorial as a modern version of the school truant officer. She travels the residential streets of Barrio Logan and Southeast, going to as many as 25 homes a day to find out why a child has not been attending school.

The purpose is not that of the traditional punitive role of a truant officer toward children and parents. Rather, it is to use personal contact both to show that Memorial cares about its students and to emphasize that consistent school attendance is critical for any success in education.

The effort of Arias is vital to hopes of San Diego city school administrators for a turnaround of educational programs at Memorial.

72% of Students Latino

It’s a school where 72% of students are Latino, where at least a quarter of the students are either not fluent in English or are still uncomfortable using the language, where more than a third of all families receive public assistance, and where 60 out of every 100 students who begin in September are not there in June, having transferred or simply disappeared because of the area’s high transiency rate that stems from the economic uncertainties facing parents.

For the past two years, the school district has pumped substantial amounts of special funding into Memorial to set up a strong academic program, along with extra tutoring, study skills classes, tighter security, and motivational strategies for children whose school experiences have been less than ideal.

Principal Tony Alfaro has placed an equal emphasis on improving the school’s attendance picture. Three years ago, 13% of the student body was absent on any given day, and of those absent, 57% had provided no valid excuse; they fell into the truant category.

Such a large number of absences not only means that less learning is taking place but also costs the school state funds, which provide the majority of education support these days. The state will not pay for a student absent without a proper excuse, and Memorial was losing hundreds of thousands of dollars yearly for the district.

“If I want the staff to work hard with kids, I need to do everything to get the kids into class and understand that attendance is not a joke,” Alfaro said.

Today, after two years of close attention to checking on each and every student absent on a given day, Memorial’s truancy rate is 17%, meaning that of every 100 absences, only 17 are without valid excuses. Total absences are down as well, with only about 90 students out of a 1,000-person student body gone daily, about 9%.

Memorial’s truancy rate is now below the district average of 19% and below the rate of such schools as Clairemont and La Jolla highs, which average about 25% unverified absences each.

Though not confined to schools in poorer socioeconomic areas, the truancy problem tends to affect those schools the most and demands constant attention to keep under control.

For example, the Sweetwater Union High School District, which covers many of South Bay’s less-affluent areas, has an almost 60% truancy rate among its total absences and wants desperately to cut the number. And many administrators are looking at the Memorial example to find out what can be done.

“The key is parent involvement, to communicate to them why it is important for their kids to come to school,” Alfaro said. “They’ve got to be convinced, and the only way (in many cases) is to visit them personally, especially since many homes have no phones.”

Two years ago, Alfaro decided to have a full-time attendance coordinator aided by a three-person staff. At most schools, the job is handled part-time by one, or two persons at the most. Alfaro also provided the staff a computerized system to keep faster track of absences period-by-period.

Absences Recorded

As soon as first-period absences are recorded, phone calls go out to the homes of absent students. If a parent or guardian cannot be reached, the name goes on Arias’ list to visit within a day or two.

“You must have a system in your office to deal with absences quickly, and to let the kids know it is not going to be tolerated,” Mike Lorch, principal at Correia Junior High School in Point Loma, agreed. “Often it starts with a kid absent just for one period and then grows into an all-day thing. You’ve got to put your money into making the home contacts.”

But making home contacts in the neighborhoods around Memorial can sometimes prove daunting, given the high transiency, the drug and crime activity, and run-down physical appearance.

So Alfaro detached a member of his attendance staff to make home visits full time, and he persuaded San Diego Gas & Electric Co., the school’s community business partner, to donate a car to Memorial for such use.

In Arias, he chose a feisty, energetic and caring single-parent with two teen-age children herself. Originally from Colombia, Arias has worked the past decade with the school district’s race-human relations program.

“Hello! Buenos Dias, Senora!” Arias called out on her first stop last week, a Newton Street home tucked between two industrial repair yards with high-voltage power lines running overhead. When no one answered, Arias tried dialing the home number using a cellular phone also provided her by Alfaro. She finally left a slip of paper in the door, requesting that the mother please call the school and explain the two-day absence of her son.

While trying to find the next address--often difficult in an area bisected by a half-dozen canyons and three freeways--Arias spotted three elementary-school boys walking along National Avenue. As she pulled her car over and began to ask why they were not in school, the kids scattered.

“I recognize one from Logan (Elementary),” she said. “I must check on that later.”

In the meantime, Arias was having trouble finding anyone at the second address. An elderly man with a cold stare directed Arias down a narrow alley, where she met an aunt of the girl who has been absent from school. The aunt promised without enthusiasm to have the girl’s mother call.

Returning to her car, Arias was approached by the elderly man and his wife, who turned out to be the girl’s grandparents. “They probably thought at first I was from immigration,” Arias said. “That’s why I always say right away I am with the school.”

The girl was sick with fever for two days, they explained, and Arias had the grandmother sign a school form. But then the mother came out from behind a fence and said the family went to Ensenada and their car broke down on the way back, so they were stuck in Baja. Arias shook her head good-naturedly. While she had received an explanation, it would mean the absence could not be excused after all because there was no sickness.

Conversation Monitored

A few minutes later, Arias dialed “01” on her cellular phone as she walked down the hill to a canyonside apartment building known as a drug-dealing area. That automatically allowed officials back at Memorial’s attendance office to hear the entire conversation in case any trouble occurred.

“I want to talk to the boy’s mother because I think that the boy is writing the excuse notes himself and I want to make sure he is really sick when not in school,” Arias said. But a burly, bare-chested and tattooed man in curlers, eyes bloodshot, opened the door and said the family moved last month. Arias left, though convinced the mother was inside the apartment, making a note to herself to confirm the address and try again.

“It breaks my heart sometimes to think the boy or girl is coming home to such an environment,” she said, adding that “it’s a miracle” such a student is even able to function in school given the lack of support and attention at home.

Later, she talked to the brother of another oft-absent student who may be a member of a gang and again spotted the truant elementary students, yelling to one in Spanish, “I’m going to get you!”

She ran into a former Memorial student whom she tried to help last semester but who dropped out and now attends night school at San Diego High, attempting in a short sidewalk conversation to let him know that she still cares about him. “I have been so worried about you and so have your teachers!” Arias admonished him.

At a C Street address Arias checked on a boy who has refused to attend school for two weeks because he has no shoes. She arranged through a social service agency for a free pair this week. Those arrangements were similar to ones made for another boy who had not shown up at Memorial because his one pair of trousers had shrunk to the point where he could no longer fit into them.

‘Used to Get So Upset’

“I felt so sorry for him sitting in the living room in only his underwear,” Arias said. “I used to get so upset but now I just try to do as much as I can.”

In some cases, the parents go to work before the children must leave for school, and do not know that their children are skipping classes. When Arias comes to such homes, she ends up persuading the students to get dressed and come back to Memorial with her. At times, she finds three or four other children in a household--all the offspring of different fathers--who are not even enrolled in school and makes a sales pitch to get them registered.

While she tries hard to educate parents, Arias said that the job requires a “fine balance. Sometimes parents overreact. One father shaved his son’s head in punishment for missing school.” But other parents have been so taken with her concern that they invite Arias regularly for lunch. Several on one Southeast block even threw a Christmas party for her.

During the evening, Arias makes phone calls to follow up on notes left at houses where no one was home.

Arias earns an annual salary of $14,000 from the district.

“The important thing is that the community knows we are out there and holding everyone accountable,” Alfaro said. “And people like Arias are the ones out there in the trenches (carrying out) the policies” such as dropout prevention which sound so easy to implement when talked about at the school board level.

Another school staffer, Javier Lara, worked Arias’s position last year. “At first, we made runs to the park right next to the school and found (many)kids hanging out there in plain view of Memorial,” Lara said. “Now if you go to the park, you may find one youngster there.”

Lara this year helps counsel those students for whom truancies represent a visible sign of frustration over poor classroom performance or severe family-related problems, rather than laziness or lack of parental discipline. With special state and federal funds, Memorial has set up counseling and skills classes that, while remedial, attempt to avoid an atmosphere of punishment traditional to such activities.

“Sure it’s hard,” Lara said. “I may work with 100 kids and only save 10, but that is 10 more than would have made it otherwise. And I keep having to remind myself that we’re not talking about more than maybe 10% of our students.”

In counseling with parents, Lara finds that many would like to work with the school more closely but that few are able to take time off from work to talk with teachers or counselors. “I ask parents to take a day off to come and talk but it’s difficult.”

State Assemblyman Larry Stirling (R-San Diego) has a bill in the legislature to require employers to give workers four daytime hours a year to visit schools.

The Memorial example is on the minds of administrators at Wilson Junior High in East San Diego, which now has the dubious distinction of having the highest rate of unexcused absences, at almost 40% daily.

While Wilson will implement a new curriculum in the fall of 1989 to create a neighborhood “magnet” school, Kimiko Fukuda, the new principal, said that she cannot wait until then to force the absence rate down.

“That is something that must be worked on immediately,” Fukuda said. “I am going to designate a person as a full-time attendance coordinator, just as Memorial did, and will look at making more phone calls and trying to get out and talk with parents.

“Memorial has been very supportive and we have a liaison with them to get a close look at their plan. But we don’t have such a relationship (with SDG&E;) so we will have to find money in our own budget somehow to carry out what must be done.

“Memorial has shown that personal contact can make a tremendous difference. You cannot do anything with (improving the education of our) kids unless they are here.”

In the Sweetwater district in South Bay, which includes 18 junior- and senior-high schools, a new rule requires that no student with two or more truants in a six-week grading period can participate in extracurricular activities.

“The Sweetwater school board felt that we have too many students out of school and their concern is about loss of instructional time in class,” Tris Hubbard, director of student services, said. “We feel that participation in athletics (and other extracurricular activities) is a privilege, and to earn that, kids should be in school.”