If people think truancy doesn’t impact the business community, East Baton Rouge Parish District Attorney Hillar Moore III says they couldn’t be more wrong.
“Those are the kids who are going to be at your business or your home taking your stuff,” he says, “or you may be looking to hire them down the road and they’re not going to be educated or trained.”
But the problem of youths regularly skipping school has an even broader long-term effect. Truancy has the greatest influence on overall crime rates, Moore says, which impact the quantity and quality of businesses and talent willing to call Baton Rouge home.
“If I had to pick the No. 1, bottom-line problem facing this city, it would have to be truancy,” he says. “All of the problems or possible successes start and end right there, and that’s really where all our money and efforts should be.”
Over the past two years, Moore’s belief has inspired him to spend more time and energy on helping to establish a one-stop shop for services to battle truancy than on any other project.
Along with partners at the East Baton Rouge Parish School System, city-parish government and sheriff’s department, Moore’s office is hoping to see the Neighborhood Place and Family Service Center come to fruition in time for the start of the 2011-12 school year.
The center initially wouldn’t create any services that aren’t already offered. It would, however, bring them all together in one location, which officials say will go a long way toward making those services the most effective.
“Right now, Baton Rouge juvenile and family services are fragmented across the city,” says Kelly Bonaventure, juvenile services coordinator in Moore’s office, “and with the transportation issues we have, especially among the poor, we know those services are not being used to their maximum potential.”
There’s no center in the state offering as many services in one location as the one envisioned for Baton Rouge, Bonaventure says. It will incorporate services from the departments of Education, Health and Hospitals, Housing, Child and Family Services, and Corrections, as well as the Louisiana Workforce Commission and local Truancy Assessment and Service Center, which focuses on truant children from kindergarten through fifth grade at 21 high-risk elementary schools. Discussions also are taking place with nonprofit agencies that currently provide social services.
The aim of the center goes beyond urging truant children to attend school. Instead, it will attempt to reach the core of underlying problems that are keeping a child from wanting to attend school.
“It is not doing anybody any good to put truant children back in school if you do not address the reasons why they’re truant,” says Roxson Welch, education outreach coordinator in Mayor Kip Holden’s office. “It’s not helping the business community, the school system or the juvenile justice system.”
Reliable figures on truancy, defined by Louisiana as five unexcused absences per semester, are not available. Officials say collection and reporting methods have varied by school through the years.
Diane Atkins, associate superintendent for student support services, says those methods now have been unified, and the current school year will be used as the benchmark.
“We don’t have true numbers from one school year to the next,” she says, “but we do know that truancy is obviously a problem all over.”
Under the direction of Superintendent John Dilworth, the school system began holding meetings with parents of students with truancy problems in 2009 as part of an increased focus on the issue. Of the roughly 42,700 students enrolled at the parish’s 85 public schools, about 5,000 required a parental visit last year.
More than half of all juvenile crimes—57%—are committed between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m., according to the East Baton Rouge Parish Department of Juvenile Services. In 2009, about 2,200 crimes were prosecuted through the juvenile department, a decrease of about 100 cases from the previous year.
But the effect of truancy on crime doesn’t stop at juveniles. Children who don’t graduate high school have limited options as adults, making it much more likely they’ll turn to a life of crime as adults, says school system general counsel Domoine Rutledge.
“If you just look at the number of murders in 2010 [80] and you look at the perpetrators’ histories … 90% of them have their origins in truancy,” he says. “And that’s just the murders. Let’s not even begin to talk about the armed robberies and street-level drug dealers.”
Thus far, $400,000 has been secured to get the center off the ground: $100,000 each from Moore’s office, the school system, city-parish government and sheriff’s office. There aren’t estimates on what the truancy center will cost to operate each year; that will depend on the number of participating agencies and the extent of their presence at the center.
What’s clear is that more money will be needed, and officials say they will eventually look to the business community for support.
“This is seed money,” Assistant District Attorney Mark Dumaine says. “This is just to open the doors and invite the organizations in. There are businesses out there that have been asking us what they can do to help now, but we really don’t have anything for them to invest in until we get the doors open. Once that happens, then we will be asking the business community for their help.”
Officials are hoping to house the center at the former Louisiana School for the Visually Impaired on Government Street, but they’re still waiting to get final approval from the state to occupy the nine-acre, 13-building site. Under the proposed arrangement, the center would use the state-owned space rent-free. Officials hope to have final word from the state very soon, but stress their plan to have the center open by the fall won’t derail if the deal doesn’t go through.
Wherever it ends up being located, officials believe the center will revolutionize the way truancy is approached, and not just in Baton Rouge.
“I really believe, without a doubt, that we have the willpower as well as the intellectual capacity to make it a reality,” Rutledge says. “Just as we go canvass other cities, I believe other cities and school districts, not only in this state but across the country, will come here to learn about what we’re doing at this facility. I believe its impact will be that potent.”
