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

Key Facts

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  The negative impact of absences on literacy is 75 percent larger for low-income children, whose families often lack the resources to make up for lost time on task.⁶
  
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  Poor children are four times more likely to be chronically absent in kindergarten than their highest-income peers. Chronic absence in kindergarten predicts unsatisfactory fifth-grade out­comes for poor children.
  
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  Children who are chronically absent in kindergarten and first grade are much less likely to read proficiently in third grade.⁷
  
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  Chronically absent sixth-graders have lower graduation rates.⁸
  
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  Ninth-grade attendance predicts graduation for students of all economic backgrounds.⁹
  
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  Children in poverty are more likely to lack basic health and safety supports that mean a child is more likely to get to school. Among other issues, they often face:
  

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  Unstable housing
  
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  Limited access to health care
  
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  Poor transportation
  
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  Inadequate food and clothing
  
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  Lack of safe paths to school, resulting from to neighborhood violence
  
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  Chaotic schools with poor-quality educational programs
  

Legal Framework

Statutes that Criminalize Truancy

Although the prosecution of students and parents may be appropriate in extreme cases—or as the last step in a broader, graduated system that provides assessments, referrals, and sufficient sup­port to ensure that students and families can access services and resources to address the underly­ing conditions or reasons that caused the truancy—the Task Force was not able to identify any research supporting the efficacy of prosecution as a primary means to improve student atten­dance on a large scale. Indeed, as described in greater detail in the Research Summary section of Task Force Findings Related to Emerging, Effective Research-Based Alternatives starting on page 12, research on effective approaches overwhelmingly supports school-based rather than law enforcement–based interven­tions as the most effective approaches for both improving atten­dance rates and reducing rates of chronic absence.

School Attendance Review Boards and Truancy Mediation

For families residing within the boundaries of the City of Los Angeles, SARBs have the option to refer parents to the City Attorney’s Office for prosecution if parents do not comply with SARB recommendations. Upon receipt of a referral for prosecution, the City Attorney’s Office files charges, and parents are required to appear in court. Once in court, if parents are able to show compliance with the Education Code and exhibit a commitment to ensuring their child’s attendance, they are offered the option of formal diversion. Formal diversion allows parents the chance to avoid prosecution by following specific steps:

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   Parents come to court on a regular basis to show that their child is attending school every day.
   
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   Parents show compliance with other terms imposed by the City Attorney’s Office, which can include (but are not limited to) signing their child into school, attending parenting classes, attend­ing family counseling, and volunteering at their child’s school.
   

Additionally, prior to initiating a prosecution, a school may request that the parent or guardian and the child participate in truancy mediation, which involves a meeting at the District Attor­ney’s office or at the Probation Department to discuss the possible legal consequences of the child’s truancy. SARBs can also refer cases to truancy mediation. In Los Angeles County, all local SARBs refer matters to local prosecutors for truancy mediation prior to requesting formal prosecution if the student and/or the parent or guardian does not comply with the SARB process.

Daytime Curfew Ordinances

In Los Angeles County, this type of ticket is referred to the Informal Juvenile and Traffic Court (IJTC), and has been punishable with a fine and the possible loss of driving privileges.

Unfortunately, in the absence of a comprehensive, research-based approach to addressing atten­dance-related issues in Los Angeles, the enforcement of daytime curfews has often been the pri­mary response to truancy, and extensive resources and effort have been focused on using law enforce­ment to ticket and cite students. For example, between 2005 and 2009, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) and the Los Angeles Schools Police Department (LASPD) issued more than 47,000 tickets under the Los Angeles City curfew ordinance.¹⁰ Data related to cur­few citations in other parts of Los Angeles County have not been collected or analyzed.

The Los Angeles City curfew ordinance’s burdens have fallen most heavily on low-income communi­ties and on families who are least able to afford them.¹¹ They include:

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  Hefty fines ($250 per citation plus court fees, which can result in fines in the thousands of dollars)
  
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  For every ticket issued, the loss for students of at least one day of school—and in some cases up to three days—to attend court
  
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  Lost average daily attendance funding, especially to the lowest-performing schools, for each day a student misses to attend court
  
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  Lost earnings by parents who must accompany children to court
  

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  Accumulated fines that low-income families cannot afford to pay, which result in youth being denied employment opportunities and driver’s licenses, further preventing them from moving forward as productive citizens
  

No evidence exists that the city curfew statute has been effective in meeting its current objective to reduce juvenile crime or juvenile victimization, and substantial research shows that daytime curfews generally have no measurable impact on crime or victimization rates.¹³ Additionally, stud­ies have shown that involving youth in the criminal justice system has the detrimental and unintended consequence of reducing their chances of graduating from high school.¹⁴ Rather than serving as a “wake-up call,” aggressive criminal justice–centered policies in and around schools are more likely to cause students to feel alienated from the educational system, causing fur­ther disengagement.¹⁵

In addition, issuing tickets is a blunt tool that does not actually address the root causes for a stu­dent’s difficulties in getting to school. Many of the thousands of students in Los Ange­les inter­viewed by the Community Rights Campaign, one of the organizations participating on the Task Force, reported a host of reasons for their struggle to get to school on time—their only means of transportation (the MTA bus) frequently runs late; they must walk their siblings to another school with a similar start time; they have a medical appoint­ment; they are dealing with mental health issues; they have unaddressed special education needs or a chronic illness; they are being bullied; they are experiencing family problems at home; or student do not see the benefit of an education or feel connected to or safe at school. Younger students may be tardy as a result of their parents’ oversleeping, their parents’ mental health issues, or their par­ents’ not understand­ing the importance of children attending school regu­larly.

In addition, the fear of enforcement for tardiness at the schoolhouse gate can cause young people (and their families) to make the choice to stay away from school if they might be late. As one twelfth-grade female student stated: “I take the bus to school. So if the bus is running late, I some­times turn around and go home because I do not want to risk getting a truancy ticket.”

Finally, citations result in the unnecessary criminalization and humiliation of youth, with stu­dents being detained, handcuffed, fingerprinted, put in the back seat of police cars, and searched.