Schools Cite Parents in Hopes of Curbing

The Escondido Union School District and the city Police Department have joined in a novel program that issues tickets to parents of excessively truant students.

Last month, an Escondido woman was the first parent in North County to be cited for her children’s truancies when she was issued a ticket similar to a traffic citation.

Renee Pisciotta, whose 11-year-old son had been absent from school 49 days and whose 8-year-old daughter did not attend school 47 times since September, was ticketed by an Escondido police officer at her home Dec. 18.

The officer simply wrote on a traffic ticket the section of the education code Pisciotta allegedly violated. State law makes parents responsible for children attending school and holds them liable if their children are truant.

The ticketing system, which was developed and first used in East County 10 months ago, allows school districts to bypass a lengthy and arduous process involving the probation department and district attorney.

Instead, the school district works through an attendance review board representing schools, police and social service agencies.

The citation issued to Pisciotta, which carries a maximum fine of $250, comes after Escondido Union’s School Attendance Review Board, or SARB, was re-established last November to tackle the growing problem of truancy. The district had dropped the program a few years ago.

“The purpose of the SARB is to get the child back into school. What we’re trying to do is resolve the problem, not punish the parent,” said Kathy Dimoff, head of Escondido Union’s review board. The review board program was established statewide in 1975.

School administrators in East County, where attendance review boards issued more than 2 dozen citations last year to parents of excessively truant students, say the new policy has worked in many cases as a deterrent, but not all.

“In a general sense, it has been effective in that we can say to students upon the first truancy that there are some significant things that could happen if they continue to be truant,” said Joe Farley, assistant superintendent at the Lemon Grove School District, which has cited one parent and counseled others through the attendance review board.

“A citation would work in the cases where a parent is an active part of keeping the child at home,” Farley said. But, “the citation will not work in cases where there is some psychological or deep-rooted issue in the child himself that is keeping the child from coming to school.”

San Diego Unified began a pilot program with attendance review boards in September at three elementary schools, and at least one school has reported significant success.

Joanne Wall, principal of Carver Elementary School, said the percentage of unexcused absences dropped from 32% before the program began to 15% in November.

“It’s been tremendous for us,” Wall said. “Not only has the attendance increased, but we’ve been able to touch base with these families and address some of the underlying reasons for the attendance problems.”

Those problems include alcohol and drug abuse, spousal abuse, and financial difficulties, Wall said. The attendance review board, once it uncovers these problems, refers the parents to the appropriate service group.

In San Marcos Unified, which created an attendance review board last month, school officials said it is likely that they will be issuing citations to parents soon.

“We have not participated in SARB prior to this year because it didn’t have teeth then, and when push came to shove nothing ever happened,” said Joe DeDiminicantanio, assistant superintendent at San Marcos Unified.

DeDiminicantanio said that, before the new program, schools by themselves had little in the way of actual authority to cite parents and students for truancy and were forced to go through probation and district attorney’s offices that had little time to address the problem of truancy.

“We very much intend to issue citations to parents who are not cooperating in getting their child to school, and we will issue a citation against the child, if the parent has no control over them,” DeDiminicantanio said.

He said t his district has reaped benefits from the very existence of the review board.

“We’ve had one family who was very remiss about this, and we called the family the day after the board had approved (the creation of the attendance review board, and the next day the kids were in school, and they’ve been here since,” DeDiminicantanio said.

“The reality is that they know that they are going to be in serious trouble, and we will probably have some people who will test on it and take us to the limit, but once that happens, people will know that we mean business,” DeDiminicantanio said.

Although the hard-line stance has not yet evolved into a “go to school or go to jail” policy, Cecil Munsey of the county Office of Education says the first parent to be jailed for truancy is “within the foreseeable future.”

“We’ve tried everything, and the schools have tried many, many things, before they get to this point, and this is the last resort,” Munsey said.

“We’re not really wanting to punish anybody, we just want to get the kids back into the schools,” said Munsey, who coordinates the 17 attendance review boards in the county.

Officer Jose Gonzalez, who wrote the ticket in Escondido, said he could have cited the parent for a misdemeanor violation of contributing to the delinquency of a minor.

“The school had contacted the mother several times as far as home visits and telephone calls, countless phone calls,” said Gonzalez, a school liaison officer in Escondido.

School administrators say that the review boards are used only after other options have been exhausted, and that legal action has its consequences on the relationship between the parents and the schools.

“Often, SARB can either be a turning point for the positive or the straw that breaks the school’s relationship with the family, and then there is a downward spiral to it,” said Laurel Dehnel, a social worker at Lemon Grove school district, which issued a citation to a parent last year.

Dehnel said that she has seen a reduction in her district of the number of truancy cases severe enough to warrant being referred to the attendance review board, but actual numbers are hard to come by.

“My sense is that we have had a reduction in middle school truancies based on the kids seeing that something is happening and realizing that this isn’t just a dead-end bluff,” Dehnel said.

And even student review board advocates say the program is not the only cure for truancy.

“There are some families that are so dysfunctional that the failure to attend school is just one of the many symptoms of their dysfunction,” said Betsy Terrazas, who works for the county’s Child Protective Services and sits on Escondido’s SARB.

Bertha Pendleton, a deputy superintendent of San Diego Unified, said “it is not a cure-all, and I doubt that any one thing is. Some students will respond to different factors, different motivations. . . .I don’t think that a single initiative like SARB will necessarily take care of the problem, but it certainly makes an important contribution.”