Old-Fashioned Hooky Has Taken a Sinister, Modern Twist : Education: L.A. prosecutor Brenda English won’t take any guff in her fight to halt hard-core truancy and pull kids off the road to prison. The strategy: Not-so-subtly put the heat on the parents. It’s working.

If not for a fluke of timing, you might have met Debra Johnson on the nightly news, another mother grieving for a child gone wrong.

Johnson is a single mother of three who until recently lived in South-Central Los Angeles--and whose son, Andre Holloway, 13, tended toward gang buddies and refused to go to school.

Then the threat arrived in the mail. On official stationery of the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office.

It read, in part: “ . . . school attendance is mandatory. You and your child’s failure to comply may result in court action against you. You and your child are requested to appear at a meeting. . . .” It was signed: Brenda English, Deputy District Attorney.

“Court action? District attorney? Don’t I have troubles enough already?” Johnson thought. She was angry and scared.

“Of course she was,” says English. “That’s exactly the reaction we want. It means we got her attention.”

Since January, English has administered a new program designed to catch truant kids before they become criminals.

“That’s what happens to truants,” English says. “Statistics show 85% of all daytime crime is committed by school kids. Statistics also show truancy is the single most common factor in the profiles of those who become adult criminals. It’s even more common than dysfunctional families.”

And because about 300,000 (out of 1.6 million) students are truant from public schools every day in Los Angeles County, English adds, the crime forecast is increasingly bleak.

So the head of the district attorney’s juvenile division, Tom Higgins, devised a plan to get parents’ attention and intercept kids before they become statistics.

His plan is unusual because it uses deputy district attorneys outside the courtroom to prevent crime, rather than inside to prosecute it.

Higgins, a father of eight, says he came up with the project--which formally began in January--after analyzing county records of “the kids who are the robbers, the rapists, the drive-by shooters. Virtually every one of them has had a failed educational experience.”

So, he reasoned, “if we get the 10-year-old back in school and functioning, he won’t become the 16-year-old drive-by shooter.” After a 15-month tryout at Parmelee Elementary School in South-Central, Higgins got a grant from the state’s Office of Criminal Justice Planning.

He then assigned three of his deputies to different areas--Pasadena, Long Beach and South-Central--putting each in charge of three schools. Their mission: to eliminate truancy.

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It is more than a full-time job, English says.

But the plan seems to be working. Of 132 truant students in the Parmelee pilot, attendance of all but one changed dramatically during the first semester; that student straightened out the next semester, English says, thereby avoiding prosecution.

Even the formerly fearful Johnson believes she was lucky her son’s problems erupted just when the plan went into action.

And even luckier that Andre’s school--Horace Mann Junior High--was in the project. And luckiest, perhaps, that someone like Brenda English was at the helm.

“I want to thank her, thank the principal, thank the tutor, thank the Lord for what happened to us,” Johnson says. “It has put our lives on a whole different track. I believe if we’d had this kind of help before, he never would have become a problem.”

Others have saluted the program too. It was a semifinalist for the Ford Foundation’s 1993 Innovations in Government Award and won the 1993 Achievement Award from the National Assn. of Counties for the abolition of chronic truancy.

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Though you can’t tell by looking at her, English is one emotionally exhausted woman.

After eight months on this assignment she remains energetic, enthusiastic--and a verbal black belt.

As a divorced mother of one and a former teacher who earned her law degree from Southwestern University at night, she can leap large obstacles to achieve a goal.

But it is hard to hear English’s backlog of truancy tales and believe she has any enthusiasm left for this seemingly overwhelming battle.

“That’s ridiculous,” she snaps. “I’ve just begun this work and we’re already turning things around. It’s absolutely exciting.”

Then she returns to her tale of a father so intent on helping his gang-involved, truant son that the father sat in all the son’s classes while the son stayed home with his friends.

“I had ordered the father to come to school with his son, to make sure the child attended every class. The son refused to go. But the father, to keep his commitment, sat through every class. He’d call me and say, ‘I am trying as hard as I can.’ Eventually, the child was so moved by his father’s dedication that he started attending school. He’s been going ever since.”

The beauty of Higgins’ plan, English says, is that parents and kids know the district attorney’s office can prosecute, can potentially put them in jail. (So far, there have been no prosecutions.)

Also, a new law ups the possible penalty to $2,500 and/or one year in jail. That’s strong incentive to do what’s right, English says.

What’s more, the Higgins method reaches hundreds of truant children and their parents in a single stroke, instead of the 10 or 15 children typically processed in a year by school-attendance counselors.

First, the prosecutor meets with school faculty and requests that teachers keep strict attendance records and that a school representative phone the parents of each child who is regularly absent or tardy.

At Horace Mann, where Andre Johnson was enrolled, for example, the faculty came up with about 200 regularly absent students.

English sent hand-signed letters inviting their parents to a mass meeting. School administrators, used to lackluster parent involvement, thought no one would show. English knew different.

“When parents see a letter from the D.A., they realize something serious is happening,” she says. “They show up, even though the meeting is held in the afternoon and they may have to miss work.”

At the first meeting, parents are generally hostile and irate, English says. But she tolerates no back talk, no excuses and no questions about individual cases. “I am there unarmed, with no guards. I want them to sit down and listen,” she says.

“First, I let them know what their legal responsibility is--that if they do not make certain their child attends school, they can be taken to court. They learn that their name, and their child’s name, is on file with our office, that they have been identified and we are monitoring them.”

To prevent prosecution, parents must sign in at the school attendance office with the child. If the child remains truant, at least the district attorney’s office will know the parent tried.

What if the parent works and can’t take the child to school?

“That’s not our problem,” English says. “If the child is truant, we say, ‘That child is your responsibility. Make sure he gets there.’ I can’t waver on that point, no matter what the hardship is.”

Also at the mass meeting are representatives from community-based organizations.

They tell the group about services they offer--from counseling and tutoring to art, music and computer classes. And, because the organizations receive part of the grant funds, English adds, they have incentive to do their jobs.

At the end of the meeting, hostility is usually replaced by grudging hopefulness, English says. Parents see they have an ally in the district attorney.

The kids show muffled enthusiasm too, English says. Most sign up for free counseling and all sorts of activities before they leave. Some parents believe their lives have been saved.

“Say your child is violent toward you at home. We have a community organization that’s available 24 hours a day, that comes to your house as soon as you call. We have parents who live in terror in their own homes. The kids’ gang comes in, takes over the house, carves up the furniture, does graffiti on the walls--the same things we see on the street every day, these parents see in their homes.”

And a little letter from the district attorney can get these warriors in school?

“Not just the letter, but the process,” English says. Even the toughest kids, at this relatively young age (9 to 12), don’t want their parents put in jail. “If nothing else, they know it’s Mom or Dad who’s their meal ticket and who puts the roof over their heads.”

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For Andre and 45 other truants at Horace Mann, the mass meeting didn’t work.

Andre’s mother would walk him to school and sign him in, but the minute she left through the front door, he’d go out the back.

English studied daily attendance records of all 200 in the group for eight weeks after the first meeting. Those who still didn’t come to school were about to enter Phase II of the Higgins plan.

“That’s where we deal with them and their parents on an individual basis, because these are the ones with deep-seated problems.” At this second meeting, English and a cadre of school and community professionals sit down with the child and parent and get into “the nitty-gritty of this family’s life.”

It is a drama that constantly “amazes and exhausts” but produces results, she says. Often, the family has never discussed their lives with such clarity.

Under English’s no-nonsense cross-examination, with help from psychology experts, the stories come out.

In Andre’s case, the second meeting was simple. Andre said he stopped going to school because he was failing every class and couldn’t do the work.

His mother backed him up, explaining he’d always had special-education classes until junior high. She also worried out loud that he might join a gang, because he had so many gang-involved friends.

The district attorney hooked Andre up with an organization to provide tutoring, free of charge, and then requested that Andre’s mother accompany him to school each day and sit in on all his classes.

“He didn’t think it was a good idea,” Debra Johnson now says. “But I went every day, along with my 5-year-old girl, because I had nowhere else to leave her. She’d draw quietly while I sat and made sure Andre stayed in class. The teachers never bothered us, ‘cause they knew what we were doing.”

Andre says it turned out to be no big deal to have his mother and baby sister, Darcel, in class every day.

“Actually, it made me feel a lot better to know my mom cared so much, that she was willing to do something like that.”

What’s more, he says, the tutoring worked so well that he wound up the semester with Bs and Cs and he’s going to really crack his books in the fall, he says.

His mother says: “Mrs. Essie Love, the tutor, was wonderful. She worked with him on everything--his reading, his math, his respect for adults. It turned him around.”

Brenda English agrees. People outside these problems tend to think the worst of those involved, she says. But the truants and their parents are often good people who need a temporary helping hand.

Francis Nakano, special assistant to the superintendent of the L.A. Unified School District, says the system has 150 employees who deal with attendance problems. “But they do not have the same leverage as the D.A.’s office, which can put an immense amount of responsibility and pressure on individuals” and can back it up with consequences.

“I would support that kind of program 100%; I wish we could have it in every school.”

Andre, asked what finally made him get his act together, said simply: “I didn’t want to hurt my mother.”

By the way, he says with wonder in his voice, “I found out I like school. I really like it.”