NEW ORLEANS — Truancy has become a major problem in New Orleans public schools, as the processes for tracking chronically absent students before the pandemic have fallen by the wayside and individual charter school groups are left to their own devices to monitor truant students.
That has led to an increase in juveniles charged with committing crimes during school hours, including the high-profile case of four school-age teens – a boy and three girls -- captured on surveillance video last March, allegedly carjacking a 73-year-old woman in Mid-City and dragging Linda Frickey to her death out the driver’s side door.
Mark Mascar witnessed it all from his house and rushed to Frickey's side to hold her hand as she died.
He soon wondered why the kids charged with murder -- 17-year-old John Honoré, 16-year-old Briniyah Baker and 15-year-olds Mar'Qel Curtis and Lenyra Theophile – weren’t in school.
“Somebody is responsible for those children during the daytime to report it to monitor and see where they are,” Mascar said. “They shouldn't be walking around these streets.”
District Attorney Jason Williams wondered the same thing as he announced the murder indictment in April.
“This crime happened at 1 p.m., in broad daylight, on a school day,” he said. “These four should have been in school.”
The DA said Frickey's horrific murder was a symptom of a larger problem.
“Truancy is rampant,” he said. “It is unaddressed, and it is unchecked. And if nothing is done, I fear that we will be here in this horrible place again.”
In 2019, prior to the pandemic shutdown in March 2020, NOLA Public Schools had 12 School Resource Officers, to handle truancy complaints for all 90 public charter schools in the city.
The district also had a Truancy Center inside Orleans Parish Juvenile Court that issued truancy summons, and the New Orleans Police Department did regular truancy sweeps.
Chief Juvenile Court Judge Ranord Darensburg said all that went away during the COVID shutdown and never came back. That, he says, has a direct impact on an increase in juvenile crime.
“Kids know that no one's checking for them to be in school and they're not attending. We really need to return to a more robust system of monitoring and supervising which youth are in school and when they aren't,” the judge said.
Juvenile court data show that juvenile arrests by the New Orleans Police Department during school hours dropped from 187 in 2019 to 73 in 2020, when students were doing remote learning from home most of the school year. But the juvenile court intake numbers went back up to 167 in 2021 and a similar pace for the first five months of 2022, when there were 80 juvenile arrests during school hours.
State law requires schools to meet with parents after a student has three unexcused absences. After five unexcused absences, schools can ask the district to issue a child or the child’s parents a truancy summons. New Orleans Public Schools generally wait until 10 unexcused absences to consider a student truant.
When the district had SROs and an active Truancy Center, the police would bring truant students into the court's Families In Need of Services program, known as FINS. Darensburg said the program is supposed to help children and their families avoid criminal proceedings.
“Before the pandemic, we had a very succinct system of watching youth and the court worked very closely with the school system,” he said.
But that connection has also been lost, Darensburg said. School leaders told WWL-TV they reported hundreds of truant cases to the New Orleans Public School district in the fall semester of 2021, but only 44 were issued summons and referred to the FINS program, according to court data.
That left individual charter schools to do their own truancy sweeps, and now FINS truancy cases are outpacing even what was seen before the pandemic. The court recorded 46 truancy cases in the spring semester of 2019, prior to the pandemic. It had 83 in the spring semester of 2022, an increase of 80 percent.
The city’s public schools are also struggling to track truancy rates because of the decentralized collection of data for chronic absenteeism and truancy.
Unlike other school districts across Louisiana, the New Orleans Public School district says it doesn't keep any citywide truancy data. The city’s 40 charter networks have to report their own truancy numbers to the state Department of Education, and “I believe that centralizing attendance is one of the most important things we need to do in a school system,” Darensburg said.
The Louisiana Department of Education acknowledged Friday that the truancy data posted on its LouisianaBelieves.com website were not always accurate.
For example, a school was listed under the wrong charter operator and with 23 truant students for 2020-21, but a truancy rate of more than 95 percent. That was removed from the data by the state Friday after WWL-TV questioned it.
There are also wild variations in the data that seem implausible, such as charter networks ReNEW Schools and FirstLine Schools with 85 to 92 percent of their students listed as truant because the state considers five or more unexcused absences to be truancy. Meanwhile, KIPP New Orleans Schools didn’t have a single truant student recorded at any of its eight schools in 2020-21.
Homer Plessy Community School had one of the lowest average daily attendance rates of any school in the state that year. Only 67 percent of its students were marked present on an average school day in 2020-2021. But, somehow, the state only recorded one truant student at Homer Plessy for that whole school year.
School CEO Meghan Raychaudhuri said that's not correct; the school reported far more truant students that year, but they didn’t show up in the official state numbers.
Other school officials reported similar problems to WWL-TV. The district attorney said he also heard about extremely high truancy rates after speaking with school leaders.
“And it appears that in some schools, close to 30%-50% of students are not back in the classroom since the COVID shutdown. And there is no outcry about that. There's been no real discussion about that,” he said in April.
But there are some signs that's beginning to change.
Jason Williams said he started by calling on renewed truancy sweeps by NOPD and by meeting with the incoming public school superintendent Avis Williams to step up enforcement.
Mayor LaToya Cantrell's Office of Youth and Families started a Working Group in April to address chronic absenteeism in schools, holding three meetings with charter school leaders, NOPD and judges from Municipal Court and Juvenile Court to set up their own enforcement plans for the 2022-23 school year.
They’ll need to implement those changes quickly. Many schools reopen in less than two weeks.
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