District to Unveil Truancy Program

Los Angeles school administrators will unveil a new program Thursday to curb truancy and juvenile crime at six San Fernando Valley schools by providing selected students with tutoring, counseling and other services over the next three years.

Project Target will focus the attention of prosecutors, probation officers and other professionals on 150 students at Chatsworth and Monroe high schools and Nobel, Lawrence, Holmes and Sepulveda middle schools.

Students selected for the program have shown signs of delinquent behavior or committed a first offense, such as shoplifting, and have problems with school attendance, low grades or other issues.

The students, in sixth through ninth grades, have been identified by probation officers, police, teachers, parents and others.

“We want to hit those kids who are most impressionable, to re-educate them,” said project coordinator Gary Yoshinobu. “This is a preventive program. We feel these kids are savable.”

The Los Angeles Unified School District is pursuing the program in conjunction with the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office, the Los Angeles County Probation Department and the United Teachers-Los Angeles union.

The district received a $1.3-million state grant for the program, one of 11 school systems across California awarded funding through recent anti-truancy legislation.

Students will meet regularly with probation officers. They also will receive medical exams, attend special classes on conflict resolution, and go to a four-week summer camp in San Luis Obispo.

Prosecutors also seek to hold parents responsible for their children’s truant behavior by filing charges, if necessary, against the adults for contributing to the delinquency of a minor, a misdemeanor that carries a maximum $2,500 fine and one year in jail, Yoshinobu said.

“It’s an opportunity to try some strategies to prevent students from dropping out and becoming truant,” Larry Moore, the school district administrator who oversees Chatsworth High, and Nobel and Lawrence middle schools, said of the program.

Moore and fellow administrator Gene McCallum, who oversees the nearby cluster of campuses around Monroe High, first discussed the idea with officials from local and national teachers unions about 18 months ago.

United Teachers--Los Angeles contacted the district attorney’s office, and it was learned that state funds for truancy programs would soon be available.

Although schools in the Chatsworth and Monroe areas have some of the highest attendance rates in the district, they still grapple with the same truancy issues as schools elsewhere, the administrators said.

The Monroe-Kennedy high school cluster of campuses, for example, had a 3% truancy rate last year, higher than many other schools in such areas as downtown and Lincoln Heights.

“The location may be different but the problems are the same,” McCallum said.

School Supt. Ruben Zacarias and Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti will announce the new program at a news conference at school district headquarters. Board of Education President Julie Korenstein and board member Valerie Fields also will be present.