A comprehensive Approach to Improving Student Attendance in Los Angeles County a report from the School Attendance Task Force

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Foreword

A sign in one of our dependency courts says, “Education is our passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today.” Obviously, to obtain that passport, one needs to go to school.

Each year, our juvenile courts in Los Angeles County are involved with between 150,000 and 200,000 children and youth and their families through our three divisions—delinquency court, dependency court, and informal juvenile and traffic court. The overwhelming majority of these young people are of school age, and a large number of them have school issues, including those surrounding attendance. One obligation in the juvenile courts is to ensure the well-being of the children and youth we see, and education is one of our paramount concerns.

In 2005, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors created the Education Coordinating Council (ECC) to bring together the juvenile courts, county agencies (such as Probation, the Department of Children and Family Services, the Department of Mental Health, and the Public Defender), school districts, and others to find ways to achieve better educational outcomes for the children and youth involved in the child welfare and juvenile justice systems in Los Angeles County. Under the auspices of the ECC, the Truancy Task Force—since renamed the School Attendance Task Force (SATF)—was created in late 2010.

The purpose of the SATF is to convene courts, youth-serving agencies, school districts, law enforcement, community entities, and others to:

Review the school attendance issues that plague schools in all 81 school districts in our county
Examine local approaches to improve school attendance
Review efforts made in other jurisdictions
Develop better, more, and—if necessary—new ways to enhance school attendance for all Los Angeles County schoolchildren, not just those before the juvenile courts (although that remains a high priority)

This report reflects the ongoing consistent and committed efforts of all those noted, plus others, to increase school attendance and enhance the educational experience of our children, improving the quality of their lives and, in turn, the quality of life for others in our communities.

School attendance is often a complex issue. There is no magic pill to cure its deficiencies. However, this report reflects a positive start to improvement. While great thanks is owed to our committed task force members—and especially to our ECC staff member Sharon Watson—we all recognize that this is only the beginning of our effort to help our children obtain that necessary passport to the future.

Michael Nash

Chair, School Attendance Task Force

Vice Chair, Los Angeles County Education Coordinating Council

Introduction

Both common sense and an impressive amount of research conclude that student attendance is absolutely critical to educational success. Students with severe attendance issues are unlikely to graduate from high school, a situation that in turn has serious long-term consequences both for the youth themselves and for our communities. Nonetheless, a crisis exists in Los Angeles County related to student attendance: according to data compiled by the California Department of Education, nearly three out of ten public school students in the county were classified as truants under California law for the 2009–2010 school year, and several districts in the county had truancy rates above 50 percent.^¹

Although it is axiomatic that the success of our youth and the long-term health of our communities depend on their being in school and acquiring the knowledge and skills necessary to thrive as they transition to adulthood, Los Angeles County has a distressing attendance problem and no systemic approach to solve that problem. The Student Attendance Task Force hopes that this initial report is the first step of many in what must be a sustained and coordinated effort to improve student attendance rates across the county. Part of that effort must be improving access to information and emerging best practices, improving collaboration among agencies (both public and private) who work with youth, and coordinating with those agencies to implement approaches and programs that are proven to work.

The recommendations in this report—developed after months of discussion, research, and information-sharing—create a blueprint for the county that, if implemented, will result in significant attendance improvements and stronger student outcomes.

Background

This section provides an overview of the key attendance definitions, research findings on effective practices for improving attendance and reducing truancy, and the existing legal framework that governs attendance and truancy in California. In addition, this section highlights several countywide initiatives and other efforts that are currently underway to move from the criminalization of school attendance issues toward more research-based alternatives for improving attendance.

Key Definitions

Although recent research has identified certain attendance-rate thresholds that are particularly significant or predictive of student outcomes, the terminology adopted by various statutes or used by researchers and policy-makers varies considerably. In fact, the same term can have different meanings to different people or within different contexts.

In California, the legislature has enacted certain provisions in the Education Code that regulate student attendance and guide how school districts and other governmental agencies address student attendance issues. These definitions, however, do not align with the attendance-rate thresholds that researchers have identified as being of particular importance. Accordingly, for the sake of clarity, key terms are defined below.

Legal Definitions

Average Daily Attendance (ADA): The total number of days of student attendance divided by the total number of days in the regular school year. ADA is usually lower than enrollment because of factors such as students moving, dropping out, or staying home as a result of illness. California uses a school district’s ADA to determine its general purpose (revenue limit) and some other funding.^²
Truancy: California has legal definitions for different levels of truancy.

Truancy: Any student who misses three days of school without a valid excuse in one school year, or who is tardy or absent for more than any 30-minute period during the school day without a valid excuse on three occasions in one school year is truant.^³
Habitual Truancy: The student has been reported as truant three or more times in a school year (after an initial report of truancy is filed, another report may be filed for each subsequent unexcused absence or tardy) and there has been a conscientious effort to hold at least one conference with the parent or guardian and the student.^⁴

Chronic Truancy: Any student who has been absent from school without a valid excuse for 10 percent or more of the schooldays in one school year, provided that the appropriate school district officer or employee has complied with certain requirements of notification and intervention required under the Education Code.^⁵

Definitions from Social Science Research

Satisfactory Attendance: Missing 5 percent or less of school in an academic year, whether excused or unexcused.
Chronic Absence: Missing 10 percent or more of school in an academic year for any reason, whether excused or unexcused. In numerous studies, this level of absence is strongly associated with declining academic performance.
Severe Chronic Absence: Missing 20 percent or more of school in an academic year—approximately two months—for any reason, whether excused or unexcused. This level of absence is strongly predictive of the student eventually dropping out.

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