Fight Against Truancy a Losing Cause : Education: It is a major problem even at good schools such as Taft High.

A stretch of chain-link fence is all that separates the strictures of school from the lure of freedom at Taft High School in Woodland Hills.

It is a symbol of the losing battle against truancy.

Taft is one of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s flagship schools, home to champion national Academic Decathlon teams. Taft students take among the highest number of advanced-placement courses and exams, and the school consistently sends large numbers of graduates to four-year universities. The state Department of Education ranked Taft among the top eight campuses in Los Angeles Unified last year based on academic programs and test scores.

Yet even here, ditching is rampant. With a 17% absentee rate--which includes legitimate absences, as well--Taft ranks squarely in the middle of the city’s 49 high schools. Truancy is so common that most students don’t even bother to call the practice “ditching.”

“We call it leaving ,” said one Taft senior. “Ditching makes it sound like junior high school. We say, ‘Let’s leave,’ and we just go.”

And they do--by the dozens, each day. They skip school to meet friends, take drugs, buy snacks, break the law or just kill time. As at schools citywide, there are as many reasons as ways to leave Taft.

Students ditch because a substitute is teaching English that day or a video is being shown in history class or they have the urge to grab a smoke.

They escape through back doors, side doors, even the front door.

On a recent day, 40 students crawled through a hole in the chain-link fence at the rear of the campus. A day later, after the hole was repaired, the teen-agers simply hopped the fence.

Some students stay close to campus, gathering at a shopping center across the street, with its pizza parlor, bagel shop and grocery store. They congregate in cars or on curbs or just walk the streets. Many return to the same ditch spot day after day. They call one hangout--a shaded hilly area adjacent to Ventura Boulevard--simply, “The Tree.”

On a recent morning, three students in baggy, knee-length shorts and flannel shirts sat in a red pickup truck parked on a street behind campus. They were bored with the routine of school but not the routine of ditching. It is more interesting, they say, to sit and “kick it” with friends than to attend classes.

For students with cars, the Ventura Freeway is only a block away. They head for friends’ houses, left empty by working parents, or board city buses to visit girlfriends and boyfriends at nearby schools.

Some join with friends and go tagging, defacing walls, fences, billboards and garages with their spray-painted graffiti.

“I run the 818,” Manuel said, referring to the San Fernando Valley branch of a Los Angeles tagging crew. “We’re battling [to see which crew puts up the most graffiti], and I need to get going.”

Manuel ditches so much he has been to his sixth-period class only once this semester.

“I have no clue where it’s at or anything,” he said, running his hand over his shaved head. “The teacher? I don’t even know who that is.”

Unlike the unabashed Manuel, some students are reluctant to reveal their truancy routines--not for fear of getting caught, but because it might lead to a crackdown on truancy at Taft.

Their stories have a veneer of rebellion that hides troubles at home, problems learning and an indifference to the rules. And they are mirrored at campuses across the city.

For some, truancy is an occasional vice. But for many others it is a daily habit that ends only when they drop out of school.

Taft senior Daniel Meyers is probably going to graduate, but he isn’t much interested in college. He lives in Woodland Hills with his parents and works at a Nordstrom department store. And he spends parts of nearly every day ditching school.

Wearing two gold hoops in one ear and a gold stud in the other, he explained, “School is just not for me.”

His mother, Carol, says she knows--sometimes--when Daniel skips classes. But she believes the school is at fault for giving its charges “a lot of freedom--too much.”

Teachers and administrators often seem to look the other way as students slip out.

Every morning, two teachers take a cigarette break at the rear door of the campus, but never question students who are leaving in droves. Other teachers pass ditching students on the way to the local mini-mall without saying a word.

Employees of nearby shops occasionally complain about their truant customers but admit that they depend on the students for business.

“It’s like a love-hate relationship,” said Mike Novack, the manager of I & Joy Bagels, close enough to Taft to hear the school bell ring. “They’re definitely a major part of our business.”

Students filled all the outdoor tables there on a recent morning, with truants out for an early lunch. Some bought food, others just lounged in the sun, listening to such rock bands as Green Day, Offspring and Pantera.

Taft Assistant Principal Howard Reisbord said the store should stop serving students during school hours.

But Novack responded that he has contacted Taft many times to report loitering teen-agers without success. “They don’t care,” he said.

Four students left school on a recent day to apply for jobs at a Mexican fast-food restaurant opening at the shopping center. The new manager of the restaurant handed out application forms and conducted interviews, never asking the youngsters why they weren’t in school.

Mike Korp, a security officer who patrols the shopping center, used to ditch when he was a student at Chatsworth High School. He is on a first-name basis with many of Taft’s regular ditchers--friendly even as he tries to persuade them to leave the shops.

“The best thing they could do,” Korp said, pointing to Taft, “is to offer classes that kids want to take.”

With 2,600 students, Taft has only two aides who are responsible for keeping students on the sprawling 33-acre campus.

They patrol hallways and doorways, and supervise the school’s midmorning and lunch breaks. But there are dozens of escape routes. Taft Principal Ron Berz said the school is planning another fence on the east side of the campus.

“If I had a ton of money and I could hire at least four more aides and station them at certain key points, maybe we could make a difference,” Reisbord said.

Taft students say it is frequently harder to get back into school than it is to leave, because they must time their return to coincide with lunch or the few minutes between periods when the halls are filled as classes change.

School administrators conduct daily sweeps through the hallways, herding late students into an empty classroom, where they must remain until the next class begins.

Students who think nothing of cutting class to sit in a car and smoke assiduously try to avoid spending a boring hour locked in detention.

One recent day, two students smoking marijuana on a curb near school seemed more worried about missing the tardy bell than getting caught with the illegal drug.

Returning students often schedule their entrance for lunchtime, when the campus is busy with seniors--who are allowed to leave campus for lunch--coming and going.

That return is sometimes little more than a visit.

One overcast morning, Jonathan, a 15-year-old freshman, met Barry--an 18-year-old who already has been expelled for truancy--at the bagel shop. The two spent the day together, walking around the campus, and then sitting and smoking in a back doorway of a nearby house.

There they exchanged stories about drugs, shoplifting and ditching. Jonathan said he would rather spend the day bumming cigarettes than sitting in class.

Jonathan’s mother drops him off at Taft in the morning, then goes to work, oblivious to his routine. His brother, expelled from Taft for truancy and enrolled in a nearby private school, still ditches.

Barry was ordered by a judge to perform community service work, his punishment for shoplifting $50 worth of pants and shoes from Topanga Plaza. He said he finds high school “excruciating.”

“They should make education more fun,” Barry said. “You’re inclined not to do things because they tell you to.”

They spend the morning roaming the streets around campus--a routine broken by the school bell signaling lunch.

Then the teen-agers decide to sneak into school. They jump over the fence, visit with friends, then leave campus again.

On another day, a blond boy who likes to smoke in his car during the day and then return to class, was shocked when police officers stopped him recently on his way to buy a soda at the Ralphs supermarket. The boy was put in the patrol car and taken across the street to school, where he received an unexpected reaction from school officials.

“Mr. Reisbord was cool,” the junior said. “He just said, ‘I understand, now go back to class.’ ”

The student said his parents never found out.

To avoid getting caught, most students attend their classes during second period, when roll call is recorded and sent to the school attendance office. School officials are considering a plan to require attendance records for all class periods, so administrators will know when a student skips class.

Some truants are youngsters who have been moved from school to school because they are troublemakers, creating a rootlessness that makes it hard for them to feel connected to Taft.

Lee is one.

The 16-year-old sophomore was most recently expelled from Taft for truancy. He stopped by the campus recently to pick up his transcripts to take to his third high school.

“Transferring us around doesn’t really help,” he said, pushing his shoulder-length wavy hair off his face. “It keeps the ones who are not doing well down.”

Lee, who lives with his mother in South-Central Los Angeles, said he has lost interest in most of his classes. Ditching, he said, got easier as his courses became more difficult.

“As soon as I’d walk on campus, I knew I’d just leave again,” Lee said.

Like other suburban campuses, Taft has a large contingent of bused students--some of whom take the bus to campus only to connect with friends and run the streets, returning to Taft in time to be bused back home.

To combat that problem, Taft now requires each bused student to show the bus driver a pass signed by their sixth-period teacher.

“In the past, students would get on the bus, drive here from Los Angeles, spend the day out of school, then come back and get on the bus at 3:15,” Berz, the principal, said.

Amber, a 17-year-old junior with a gold earring in her pierced nostril, said her commute from South-Central Los Angeles is long. She enjoys school, she says, but sometimes needs a break.

“It’s just that sometimes I get tired of going,” she said. “I hate waking up at 5 in the morning and getting home at 5 at night.”

Nathana Schooler, the district’s director of attendance and dropout prevention, said students do not see the consequences of ditching until they drop out and face the prospect of a lifetime of minimum-wage jobs. A good deal of responsibility belongs to school officials, parents and others in the community, she said during an interview at a coffee shop near Taft.

About that time, two ninth-graders strolled by.

Schooler sighed.

“Schools need to work with these kids,” she said. “[But] it takes somebody to pay attention to what’s going on.”

* RELATED STORY: A3