L.A. School Truancy Exacts a Growing Social Price : Education: Diminishing resources curb efforts to prevent it. Crime and financial losses are among results.

They are a generation of strays, these youngsters who through defiance or neglect drift away from the regimen of school.

They make their escape darting through holes in school fences or simply walking out the front gate. Many never return, frittering away their chance at graduation, that rite of passage that thousands of their classmates are enjoying this week.

They ditch to smoke or drink or use drugs, to escape tests or to just hang out.

They are truants--thousands of Los Angeles city high school students for whom campuses have become little more than meeting places.

Once seen as the responsibility of all adults--whether teachers or parents, shopkeepers or neighbors--they are being lost to dwindling public resources, the demands on working parents, and a society that seems increasingly indifferent to its young.

Truants are largely ignored as they squander youthful hours and days on city streets. But they present a growing social problem that is exacting a steep price:

* An average of 62,000 students--10% of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s enrollment--are out of school each day. Of these, only half come back with written excuses. That cost the district more than $69 million in per-pupil state funding from its $3.8-billion annual budget last year. District schools rarely verify excuses, and the district does not keep statistics on truants. But officials of the nation’s second-largest district concede that the problem is growing. They point to the district’s steep dropout rate and declining graduation rate as evidence more students are drifting away from school.

* State and county education officials say widespread truancy is a direct cause of the alarmingly high dropout rate in Los Angeles because “a majority of students who skip school eventually drop out,” said Phyllis Hart, executive director of the Los Angeles-based Achievement Council. The state Department of Education this month reported that 44% of the district’s class of 1994 quit school before graduating. The district’s graduation rate is 20 points below the national average, and has gotten worse in the past 15 years. In 1980, 63% of ninth-graders stayed in school long enough to get a diploma. In 1990, the rate had dropped to 52%, and experts say the class of 1995 will fare even worse.

* Daytime crime rates are rising in part because growing numbers of students are skipping school and committing crimes, said LAPD spokesman Lt. John Dunkin. When Los Angeles Police Department officers in Van Nuys this spring conducted a rare, three-week-long school truancy sweep, shoplifting arrests fell 60%. Other youths spend their unsupervised days scrawling graffiti on garage doors, storefronts and office buildings. A report compiled by the Los Angeles County Office of Education on the factors that contribute to juvenile delinquency concluded that school absences are “the most powerful predictor” of delinquent behavior.

* Taxpayers shoulder the rising costs of truancy. They subsidize growing numbers of unschooled youngsters who end up on welfare rolls or underemployed, say educators and sociologists. “When you simultaneously have a situation where the job market looks bleak and the schools are out of control, truancy becomes a subculture on its own,” said author Mike Davis. More than half of the nation’s jail inmates are school dropouts, according to a Bureau of Justice Statistics report.

* Children who are truant are at a higher risk of being drawn into behavior involving drugs, alcohol or violence. Studies show that chronic truants are more likely to use drugs; in one study, half of the truants admitted smoking marijuana in the prior six months, compared to 29% of their non-truant classmates, and nearly one-third of the truants said they took two or more drugs on the same day.

More Pressing Tasks

Despite these grim facts, truants are left to rely mostly on their own consciences to battle the temptations to ditch. School officials’ attention is turned to what they say are more pressing tasks, such as preventing campus violence and teaching those who want to learn.

“In a twisted sort of way, there’s sometimes an advantage to the schools in having these kids out,” said Board of Education President Mark Slavkin. “They’re not on campus making trouble and making class size larger.”

Many teachers would hesitate to agree with Slavkin. Yet they do feel overwhelmed by burgeoning class sizes and shrinking budgets, and say they cannot help lost teen-agers because their hands are full teaching the students who do attend class. They do not have the time to locate missing students, or have tried but given up, frustrated by disconnected telephone numbers or parents who do not seem to care.

In the past, ditchers would skip class to spend a day at the beach. Now, many students frequent ditch parties--often involving drugs and alcohol--at homes and apartments left empty by working parents.

Some truants seek out unrepaired buildings left vacant after the Northridge earthquake. Others hang out at shopping malls, grocery stores or doughnut shops. They gather in parking lots or sit on street curbs drinking or smoking.

Some students try ditching briefly, then return to school when they are caught by parents or school officials. For others, it becomes a habit difficult to break.

“It’s like an addiction,” explained Jonathan, a 15-year-old freshman at Taft High School in Woodland Hills as he walked along Ventura Boulevard, skipping his third-period class. “Once you start ditching, you can’t stop.”

Off-Campus Lunches

For decades, occasional ditching has been a tradition among high school students. But the practice was given a boost in the 1960s, when many schools began allowing teen-agers to leave campus for lunch in an effort to make schools less rigid. Now many educators say this societal loosening of the rules has backfired.

In Los Angeles, many schools have gone back to closed-campus rules and do not allow students to leave while school is in session. Others let students go off campus for lunch, but expect them to return in time for class.

“I think schools are much better off to keep these kids on campus,” said Maurice Ross, the assistant dean of education at USC and a former school superintendent and principal. “Turning kids loose just invites problems.”

Experts say increases in the number of working and single parents, who are rarely home during the day, also have made it easier for students to get away with skipping school.

“If a parent doesn’t have control by the time students are in their late teens, they’re not going to all of a sudden get control,” said Jim Hartfield, an assistant principal at Washington Preparatory High School in South-Central Los Angeles, where about 200 students are chronically absent. “Parent involvement would help. But what can a parent do?

“A lot of people we make calls to never call back,” Hartfield said. “Some are just hostile. They say, ‘Why can’t you guys do something?’ ”

Some working parents even depend on school-age children to keep the family afloat. School district administrators say they know of children who are kept home from school to baby-sit preschool siblings. And other students must take part-time jobs that require them to leave school early.

California law requires parents to send children to school until they graduate, turn 18 or pass a state high school equivalency test. If they don’t, parents can be charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor. A related law allows judges to take habitual truants away from their parents and declare them wards of the court.

But school districts and local prosecutors seldom seek those legal actions--partly because so few truants are caught.

Catching students out of school was once the work of school truant police. But in a vicious cycle, budget cuts have eliminated truancy officers, whose efforts once brought in students--and revenue. Five years ago, Los Angeles Unified had 250 attendance officers supervising its 650 schools and 625,461 students. Today, with 10,000 more students, the district has only 190 attendance officials. As a result, truancy continues largely unchecked.

“In the main, what we’ve been about is cutting the very support services that are designed to help with this problem,” said Los Angeles Unified School District Supt. Sid Thompson. “You can’t get them in school unless you can go out and find them.”

In desperation, the Los Angeles City Council--not the Board of Education--has turned to police for help.

Los Angeles is behind at least a dozen other American cities in using police to deter truancy. In New York, police patrols pick up truants; Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said he believes schools alone cannot handle the problem.

“Of course, the first effort should be parents and counselors, but the reality is that isn’t going to work alone,” Giuliani said. “It is an appropriate law enforcement problem.” Attendance has improved nearly every month since the police truancy program began last fall, New York officials say.

In Los Angeles, current Police Department policy allows officers to return truants to campus, but only if the school is within the boundaries of the local police division. Otherwise, police only can instruct students to return to school.

“It’s almost impossible to take real effective action under the current state of the law,” said Detective Craig Rhudy of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Van Nuys Division. “We cannot lock up kids for truancy . . . and many parents are really at a loss at making kids stay in school. The law desperately needs to be changed.”

It will change Oct. 1. Police will then have authority to write tickets for truants under an ordinance approved by the Los Angeles City Council and written by Councilwoman Laura Chick. The new law makes ditching a crime punishable by $50 fines or community service and the loss of driver’s licenses.

Chick, whose daughter began skipping school as a senior, said school administrators are partly to blame for the growing truancy problem.

“To shrug their shoulders and say we can’t do anything about it doesn’t make sense to me,” Chick said. “To me, the key here is to deal with why kids are out of school. The feedback that these kids have gotten for probably a decade or more is that nobody really cares.”

But the criminal justice system has limited power to reform students who ditch, say many prosecutors, judges and school administrators.

In New Jersey, Paterson Municipal Judge Miguel de la Carrera has been ordering the parents of truants to perform community service in their children’s schools.

“Does it really address the problem? No, but it’s something,” he said. “There isn’t much I can do. . . . At the very least, it gets the kids and the parents to school.”

Tom Higgins, who heads the Los Angeles County district attorney’s juvenile division, said solutions ought to begin in the state Legislature, which could force school districts to police truancy by changing school funding laws.

Every state in the nation but California funds schools according to the number of students who attend class each day. Only California distributes tax dollars to schools for students who are absent, but return with a note explaining the absence from a parent or doctor.

Higgins and others say school districts should only be paid for actual attendance--not for students absent with legitimate excuses, such as an illness, doctor’s appointment or funeral.

“I think you’d see a substantial impact on truancy, dropout rates and ultimately crime rates,” Higgins said. “The courts . . . should not become a first step for frustrated school officials who continue to move the problem from their desk to our desk.”

As a result, Los Angeles Unified and other districts statewide have no financial incentive to question written excuses given by students--which gives many truants an easy way to hide their transgressions.

“[Schools] are delighted when a kid brings a note--even if it’s a lie,” said one Los Angeles Unified official who works with attendance and budgets. “It brings in money.”

Stymied Reform Efforts

Efforts at reform have been stymied.

A legislative proposal to tie district funding to the number of students actually present in each class was roundly rejected several years ago. Urban school districts, such as Los Angeles and San Diego, argued the measure could cost them money and require too much time of teachers, who would have to report absences after each class. Now, an official attendance tally is taken only once each day, in second period homeroom. A student who shows up second period gets credit for the day, even if he or she cuts every other class.

Gov. Pete Wilson proposed linking welfare benefits of parents with their children’s school attendance in his welfare reform plan. But Corinne Chee, spokeswoman for the California Department of Social Services, said the idea was abandoned because tracking school attendance proved too difficult.

What districtwide efforts Los Angeles has tried have proven ineffectual.

The district uses an automated dialing system to alert parents when their children miss school. The system, used in middle and high schools, leaves a recorded message at students’ homes.

However, “the kids pick up a lot of those calls and their parents never hear the message,” Thompson said.

City school district officials also operate a 24-hour telephone hot line to receive tips on students ditching school.

The hot line--now in its first full year--asks callers in English and Spanish for the names of students skipping class. School counselors use the information to call and make visits to students’ homes and schools.

But the hot line is virtually unknown outside the schools and little used. Last month, the district received just 31 calls, and officials say they do not have the resources to advertise the line or handle many more calls.

The only real answer to truancy, say experts, is a combined effort of parents, schools and police.

Top on the list of anti-truancy weapons is the quality of the school.

“The best truancy prevention is a good school--one that invites and motivates student learning,” said Joan Lipsitz, the former director of the Center for Early Adolescence at the University of North Carolina.

Next on the list is the will to change.

South Gate Effort

South Gate High School, an LAUSD school that serves the blue-collar, largely Latino Southeast Los Angeles County community of South Gate, had the worst attendance record of any of the district’s 49 high schools two years ago.

Then the school embarked on an aggressive effort to improve, using methods that cost very little.

School officials have parents and students, at the beginning of each year, sign a document that lists legitimate excuses for missing school. Every morning, counselors, clerks and administrators meet with students returning from an absence and scrutinize written excuses. When there is a question, school officials call parents.

And students who rack up eight or more unexcused absences cannot attend school proms, football games and other popular campus social events.

Now, attendance at South Gate has soared to the highest in the district--more than 95% of the student body attends school on an average day.

Although school board members applauded the methods used at South Gate, they have not ordered them to be used at any other school. Critics of the district say that is evidence the massive bureaucracy is too big to respond even when solutions are found to problems.

A few schools have followed South Gate’s example and are making modest gains in attendance rates by recruiting volunteer parents and hiring additional office help.

Sometimes, improvement hinges on the intercession of one key person.

At Canoga Park High School, Principal Larry Higgins has started personally attacking the truancy problem. Most mornings he walks across the street from the campus and retrieves students eating breakfast at Taco Bell. Then he goes behind a nearby apartment building to round up students who gather there to smoke. And he has asked the local gas station owner to stop selling cigarettes to underage students.

“I don’t know if you can eliminate it, but maybe you can curb it,” said Higgins, adding that it is too soon to tell whether his efforts are paying off.

Thompson acknowledges the majority of city schools are failing to reach truants.

“We have to make some changes at all our schools,” Thompson said. “How we deal with these kids is a challenge to all of us.”