WEAA: Not Present or Accounted For: The Attendance Crisis in Baltimore Schools Part II (2008-09-17)

Here in the small office of Student Support at school headquarters, the phone bank is working overtime. During the first week of school, a staff of 20 is making more than 7-thousand calls to city residents. They repeat one question with each new dial tone: Is your child in school?

The calls are part of a new strategy by administrators at North Avenue. They are flooding the zone of troubled young lives with aggressive interventions centered on staying in school. On Aug. 7, a letter from Baltimore City State's Attorney Patricia Jessamy was mailed to parents and guardians of thousands of truant students. It is your legal responsibility to attend school regularly, the letter reads. Failure to do so could lead to a fine of 50 dollars and/or 10 days in jail for each day of unlawful absence. It's too early to know if that tactic will work. Neither Jessamy nor anyone in her office would agree to talk about it for this series.

But schools CEO Andres Alonso said the problem is much wider than simply leveling threats at families, It's clearly a challenge that we need to address.

The CEO said step one is examining just how daily attendance is recorded. Presently, that is a flawed system because of inconsistencies between schools. Attendance taking is one thing targeted by Alonso for reorganization. Changes will include a computerized roll call for homeroom teachers who then upload attendance figures within seconds to the central office. Alonso addressed the challenge. Attendance is about data entry and about decisions that are being made at the schools in terms of how do they capture who's there. So there is a problem in terms of accuracy of the data.

Another push at headquarters focuses on a different kind of data gathering. It involves a partnership with city and state agencies like the Department of Social Services and the Juvenile Justice Center to attack the problem of habitual truancy from a more personal angle. The focus is aimed at struggling teens in middle and high school. "Eighth and ninth grades seems to be where we're having the largest percentage of our students start to miss time.

That's Dr. Tina Spears. She heads the office of student support and is using a wide range of new data to work up a student profile to target the school attendance crisis.

You may see a pattern in the eighth grade, but when they get to the ninth grade, I'm not sure it's because they have less supervision or they are feeling themselves to be a little grown. But that's where the age limit is in ninth grade, where it's the highest percentage of truancy in city schools.

Taking a scientific approach to a very real, human problem is a tricky endeavor. Dr. Spears explained that, ironically, many of the system's truants have posted high academic achievements when in school.

When we look at their record, many have good academic abilities and skills, but for whatever reason they are not challenging themselves, or they are not being challenged in schools, so what I'm finding is they are staying out because the streets are consuming them with other things to do. We have students on the corner using drug activities and they are extremely bright and doing well in school, but they chose another path, they are becoming disengaged and choose the streets.

Locating these students and helping them back to the classroom is what Donte Wilson does best. The 31-year-old former teacher and community activist in Union Square doesn't need data. He attacks school attendance problems witnessed daily as teens hang on the corners during school hours through a program called Reclaiming Our Children.

Monitoring homework activities at an after-school program on the second floor of the old Kovins Furniture Store on W. Baltimore Street, Wilson explained he has recruited a team of ex-drug dealers and felons, given them a second chance in life and charged them to reach out to teens as mentors. They have street cred, he said. And that makes a difference.

Because they may have been those people breaking the laws and things to that nature, they are already known by the community, and unfortunately, they are looked up to by the community. And then to look at the flip side of the coin, if I was to take social worker who just had book knowledge and theory when you go into these urban communities, they are afraid to go inside, which means that our services won't be at its best.

It's an unorthodox approach to a raging problem in Baltimore. And so far, Wilson says he has recorded dozens of success stories, some we'll highlight next week.