Tracing Truants Takes Grace And Persistence

No one answered Rose Garcia’s knock at the door of the apartment in the Buena Clinton neighborhood of Garden Grove. So Garcia, a field representative from the Garden Grove Unified School District, peered in an open window and looked around.

“She’s gone to do her laundry,” a woman standing along a second-story railing shouted down to her in Spanish.

Garcia asked her, also in Spanish, if it was indeed the home of Senora Leonora. The neighbor said it was.

“Does she have a 15-year-old daughter named Martha?” Garcia asked. The woman said she had seen only small children at the apartment.

Garcia was on the trail of another truant student, this time a 10th-grader at Santiago High School in Garden Grove, which has a 25% dropout rate, higher than the countywide average of 16.9%, according to a recent statewide survey.

For Latino students, the dropout rate countywide is more than twice that of Anglo students. At Santiago High, Latino students drop out at the rate of 36.5%.

During that one recent morning of home visits, Garcia found that the reasons why students drop out of school run the gamut.

She marched into a laundromat around the corner from the Buena Clinton apartments, in a strip shopping center where the windows are barred.

A woman with hair to her waist was loading clothes into a dryer at the far end, and a little boy stood watching. Garcia asked whether she was Senora Leonora.

The woman said yes, and a friendly exchange followed. Garcia said she was from the schools and had come to ask about Martha. Garcia, an 11-year veteran of field work for the district, was polite and sympathetic. The conversation could have been between any two mothers discussing their children.

“She ran away with her boyfriend,” Senora Leonora told Garcia. Garcia made notations in the clipboard she always carries and asked her how things were going otherwise. The woman said she has another daughter, a student at Doig Intermediate School. Garcia asked about her.

“Well, I sent her to Houston, so she’s living there now,” she said.

The sisters will be counted as dropouts for Garden Grove Unified if they do not return to school within 45 days, in accordance with state reporting methods. More than likely, Garcia said, these two will not return.

Next, Garcia went to another apartment in Buena Clinton. Even before she approached the door, she could see the empty apartment through the windows, which lacked curtains.

“They’ve moved,” she said. The family left no forwarding address, and so far the district has not received a request for the student’s transcript from any other school, which would be a sign that the student intended to continue his schooling. Again, he will be marked as a dropout after 45 days.

Garcia then went to the home of a woman who has legal guardianship of her 14-year-old grandson.

Through a door with a torn screen, the grandmother greeted Garcia.

“Oh, I meant to call the school to tell them,” she said. “(He has) been in Juvenile (Hall) all summer. He won’t be making it to school for a while.”

Garcia did not ask how the boy had gotten into trouble, but she did ask when his next court date is. She left her card with the grandmother and told her to call the school when the boy is ready to return.

Ray Arroyo, director of child welfare and attendance at the Garden Grove district, and Terry Anderson, who used to oversee the field workers, said Garcia is on the front lines of the district’s efforts to reduce its dropout rates.

She may be the first contact parents have with the system, and her job is to put them in touch with a network of other personnel or teams that try to get at the root of the problem keeping the student out of school. They say that because she is Latina, Garcia makes inroads where others might not.

“It helps a lot that I’m bilingual,” she said, walking down the sidewalk at Buena Clinton. “A lot of the school personnel would not come in here unless they were in twos or threes, but I have no problem.

“The minute you say buenos dias , they know you’re no threat to them,” she said.