HUNTINGTON PARK : School Cures the Itch to Ditch

It’s time for biology class. Do you know where your teen-ager is?

Huntington Park High School parents know where their children are, thanks to a new program in which every absence from every class is reported with a phone call home.

Many students said that since the program started in July, they don’t casually cut class anymore, and teachers joke that classrooms are now too full. School attendance figures show a 7% decrease in absences in July and August, the most recent figures available.

“Things were really getting out of hand” before the program began, said Assistant Principal Marvin Gunderson. “The kids were beating the system.”

“All you had to do is go to homeroom and ditch the rest of the day,” said one 16-year-old junior. “Now, people come to school. They say, ‘I got to go to class or they’ll call home.’ ”

Social studies teacher Harry Sauberman, who proposed the program, said absences in some of his classes have been cut in half. His classroom attendance rate is about 91%, he said, better than the Los Angeles Unified School District average of 89%.

Sauberman, the teachers union representative at Huntington Park, said he polled teachers before recommending the program to the administration. Faculty members voted 77 to 8 in favor, he said.

“The only concern of the teachers is that it will die out,” he said.

The program is so labor-intensive, it may be difficult to maintain, said John Gates, the district attendance counselor at the school. The school tallies absences from 90 attendance rosters each period. By the end of the next day, every truant’s home has been called and parents know that their child was out of class without a valid excuse. Teachers’ assistants, who have been pulled from classrooms, and parent volunteers make the calls.

When the program is working best, a parent may be called minutes after the child is discovered absent, Gates said. “We try to let people know: ‘Your child is not in class right now. Do you know where they are?’ ” Gates said.

Two years ago, Huntington Park High had six employees who handled attendance problems. Because of budget cuts, the 3,980-student school now has only Gates--and the phone program.

It is one of several district efforts to improve record-keeping and student attendance.

In the Southeast area, Bell and Garfield high schools and Nimitz and Virgil middle schools are participating in a similar computerized pilot program. The program was implemented by the district to head off a state order to tighten its attendance tracking, said district Budget Director Henry Jones. State allocations are made to school districts based on student population.

This year, the state accepted the district’s current policy, which formally counts students in homeroom and gives a full day’s credit to a student who is in school at least half a day. However, the district is likely to switch its policy soon to one that tracks students throughout the day, Jones said.

The need for a new attendance policy is more than clear, Gates said. “Period absences become full-day absences, which become 45-day dropouts if you’re not careful,” he said.