NEW ORLEANS — Mayor LaToya Cantrell’s administration is getting involved in public school governance again, this time hoping to team with the city’s all-charter school system to make sure kids show up to class regularly.
The New Orleans Police Department promised Monday to restore its enforcement of truancy laws this school year for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic forced schools to close in March 2020 and start holding classes virtually.
In 2018, Cantrell also jumped into school issues when she launched a new program to oversee school bus safety, insurance policies and bus driver licensure after the New Orleans Public School District failed to monitor dozens of private school bus operators hired by more than 40 charter school organizations.
Now, the problem is truancy -- the repeated, unexcused and illegal absence of students from school.
Criminal justice officials, including Juvenile Court Judge Ranord Darensburg and District Attorney Jason Williams, said truancy spiraled out of control in New Orleans after schools returned to in-person classes last school year.
A WWL-TV investigation found the problem, while part of a nationwide trend, is particularly acute in New Orleans.
Darensburg and Williams both said the truancy problem is having a direct impact on rising rates of juvenile crime.
They also complained that enforcement of truancy laws had fallen by the wayside during the pandemic and never returned.
Cantrell announced a four-part plan Monday to get students back in the classroom more consistently.
The plan followed a series of working group meetings this summer with charter school leaders, NOLA Public Schools officials, the New Orleans Police Department, the District Attorney’s Office and judges from juvenile and municipal court.
The plan includes:
– Clarifying the process for contacting families and intervening when kids are chronically absent.
– Improving the collection of data on truancy and chronic absenteeism
– Restoring the collaboration between the school system and the courts
– Resuming the work of 12 police officers known as School Resource Officers, who focused on enforcing truancy laws before the pandemic.
Cantrell announced the plan at Schaumburg Elementary School, a charter school in New Orleans East where 654 students, nearly 85% of its enrollment in 2020-21, had at least five unexcused absences during that school year, according to data from the Louisiana Department of Education that was confirmed by ReNEW, the charter management company that runs Schaumburg and two other city schools.
The mayor noted that she is not technically 'responsible' for school attendance but, as with the school bus issue, she decided to intervene because truancy affects the whole community.
“We’re demonstrating on the front end that this is a serious problem,” Cantrell said. “It's something that has impacted the quality of life of our city overall, but more importantly, the academic achievement of our young people.”
NOPD Superintendent Shaun Ferguson said the School Resource Officers – who had been assigned to handle truancy cases before the pandemic in the seven police districts, covering each of the city’s 90 public charter schools – had been redeployed to other responsibilities during the pandemic shutdown and weren’t put back on truancy enforcement for the 2021-22 school year.
“We were not able to enforce as we have done in the past,” Ferguson said. “We had some schools that were physically in school. Some were still doing school virtually. So how do you properly identify what school this child attends, if at all?”
But Ferguson said with a return to relative normalcy, those SROs are back on the case for the 2022-23 school year.
WWL-TV’s investigation last week found significant errors and conflicting information in the truancy and attendance data charter schools were reporting directly to the state.
For example, Homer Plessy Community School reported a state-low average daily attendance rate of 67.5%, meaning a third of students were absent on any given day.
And yet, it only had one truant student recorded in the state data, which the school’s own CEO said was incorrect.
Avis Williams, who came to New Orleans from Selma, Ala., started as superintendent of NOLA Public Schools only two weeks ago.
She said she met with charter school leaders Monday morning and the district is still working with them to find the best way to collect uniform data on truancy and chronic absenteeism.
Students are considered chronically absent if they miss school 10% of the time, or 18 days a year.
Emily Wolff, director of the Mayor’s Office of Youth and Families, said schools that averaged 95% attendance before the pandemic were now reporting attendance rates in the 80% range.
She also said truancy has been a bigger problem among younger kids, but the district performed 2,000 truancy checks last year and focused those only on older students, those in 7th-12th grades.
Wolff said there was no uniform process for referring students for truancy violations.
Court data show only 103 cases were referred in 2021 to juvenile court, where the Families In Need of Services (FINS) program is supposed to help parents get truant students back in school without being charged with a crime.
“School starts next week,” Wolff said. “And so, we believe that we need to be all-hands-on-deck.”
Even with a collaborative approach, school leaders acknowledge they need more buy-in from parents and neighbors to stem the truancy tide.
NOPD’s ever-shrinking force is struggling to respond to violent crime and doesn’t have the manpower to do the kinds of truancy sweeps it once did.
Plus, school leaders tell WWL-TV that children spent so much time inside during the pandemic that they’re more likely now to skip school to play video games and hang out with friends on social media, out of sight of any police patrols.
“We need buy-in from the community,” said Olin Parker, the Orleans Public School Board chairman. “We need that village to step up.”