Law enforcement officers have picked up nearly 200 juveniles for truancy violations since the beginning of the school year, and about half of those since the city’s new truancy center—officially called the Family and Youth Service Center—opened on Government Street near Interstate 10 in mid-September.
While those offenders likely would have been picked up for skipping school in previous years, this is the first time multiple social service agencies in the city-parish that deal with truancy and related issues are working together under one roof.
“This provides one-stop shopping,” says District Attorney Hillar Moore III, who led the efforts to create the center, which is housed on the nine-acre campus of the former Louisiana Center for the Visually Impaired. “We don’t have truant kids; we have truant families. So this is a way to address the problems in those families that are contributing to the truancy.”
While 200 truancy violations is a lot for a 10-week period in a city this size, Moore says, the number is actually down a bit from previous years, which he believes is due in part to the city’s tougher truancy policies.
Housed in classrooms throughout the 13 newly renovated buildings at the Family and Youth Service Center are offices for social services agencies, East Baton Rouge schools, the Baton Rouge Police Department, East Baton Rouge Sheriff’s Office and its DARE program, Project BRAVE, and the district attorney. They have a coordinated system for dealing with truancy, which has been a focus of Moore’s since he took office four years ago.
“It seems to me that juveniles are committing more violent crimes and at younger ages,” he says. “The key to nipping it in the bud is to intervene at an early age.”
To that end, the center devotes a lot of resources to dealing with parents and problem families that have young children not in school. Since the center opened, five adults have been arrested for failing to properly supervise a juvenile, the misdemeanor with which parents are charged for failing to send a child to school.
While the center is still new and all the kinks are being ironed out, Moore and his staff are thinking about the future: specifically, a long-term funding plan for the center. Grants of $100,000 each came from the Huey and Angelina Wilson Foundation and the Irene and C.W. Pennington Foundation to pay for the renovation of the buildings and IT equipment.
The center also has operating funds of $500,000 a year for the next three years, which has been committed by the EBRSO, the district attorney’s office and EBR schools, each of which is putting up $100,000 a year, and the city, which is kicking in $200,000 a year. What happens after year three, however, is anyone’s guess.
“We’re looking to the private sector,” Moore says. “We’re working on a long-term plan.”
