Students Who Major in Being AWOL : Truant problem plagues L.A. schools; it has to be addressed

The Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum seats 67,800. Every weekday, you could nearly fill it with the students who fail to show up for classes at the Los Angeles Unified School District. The daily absences (estimated at 62,000) represent about 10% of the enrollment of the nation’s second largest school system.

How many of them are truants? Perhaps half of them. As The Times’ series on LAUSD truancy pointed out, absentee students have become an immense problem.

It translates into the LAUSD’s abominably low graduation rates, which now stand at 52%. By contrast, the national average is 70%. It also translates into crime. During a three-week sweep in Van Nuys earlier this year, for example, police picked up 576 truants from 24 high schools, and more than 180 of them had 500 prior arrests for everything from murder to weapons possession.

Truancy is exacerbated by causes ranging from school personnel who do not even question obviously truant students to merchants who depend on them for business.

The LAUSD’s automated system for telephoning the parents of missing students is easily circumvented, and some blame may fall on the state Legislature. Why? California is the only state that distributes tax dollars to schools for students who return with a note of excuse after being absent. All other states pay only for students actually in class. Very lenient state standards may trickle down to the schools. The LAUSD does not even keep statistics on truants.

The scope of the problem mitigates against easy solutions. Sure, the Los Angeles Police Department will be allowed to ticket truants and haul their parents into court beginning this fall. But if the LAPD was to focus heavily on all the students not in school, it would have time for little else.

Public consensus ought to be achievable on at least one point: The worst thing to do would be to wring our collective hands and fret that there is too little money, too little time and too little energy to deal with the problem.

At Canoga Park High School in the San Fernando Valley, principal Larry Higgins has enlisted parents, community members and local businesses in fighting truancy. His message: Encourage youngsters to return to school. (It ought to be remembered that not every truant is some fearsome gang member who can’t be approached.) South Gate High School has risen from last to first in attendance among LAUSD high schools by employing similar measures and other means. That is the sort of initiative needed to lick the truancy problem.