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New Mexico News

Truancy Rate Still 'Horrendously Bad'
Posted by () on Jun 10 2008 at 3:30 PM
NM News >>

The new and improved student truancy rate Albuquerque Public Schools staff released this week should have made the school board happy.
Instead, it drew more remarks about how "horrendously bad" the number still was, and left some members more confused than ever before.
In the state's recent district-by-district report on habitual truancy— defined as 10 days of unexcused absences a year— APS posted some discouraging numbers: 31.5 percent of students districtwide were truant last year, with a whopping 66.8 percent in high school. That was the highest rate in the state.
Some board members were alarmed. Truancy has been identified as a leading cause of low grades and low graduation rates, and the state for years has scraped the bottom on both measures in national rankings.
But APS officials called the state numbers "totally inaccurate." And because districts were free to define unexcused absences as they pleased, they dismissed any comparisons.
Even the state Public Education Department— which wrote the report— questioned its accuracy and removed it from the department's Web site days after the Journal published an article about it.
So APS officials came up with what they're calling a more accurate habitual truancy rate for the district.
The result: 11.7 percent, nearly two-thirds less than the figure in the state's report.
Rose-Ann McKernan, APS' director of research, development and accountability, said the district did several things differently this time:

A student had to miss at least half of his or her classes on a given day, as opposed to just one period, to rack up a half-day of truancy.

If a student missed just one period on a given day, it no longer counted toward truancy.

It accounted for the fact that some truant students miss more days than others.

It used enrollment figures that accounted for all students who had attended APS schools throughout the year instead of an end-of-year count, by which time some had dropped out.
Board member Marty Esquivel viewed such a large drop skeptically. "Frankly, I don't know which numbers we can really trust."
Board member Robert Lucero said that even the new figure of 11.7 percent is "horrendously bad," and scant evidence of any improvement.
"Things are not getting better in this district," he said. "They're getting worse."
APS' graduation rates, stuck at a percentage in the low 50s, were "abysmally low," he said.
District officials said a new program that will start automatically notifying parents by phone or e-mail next school year if their children miss a class should help address a student's absences before they get out of hand.
Esquivel called for a renewed effort to collaborate with other agencies like the Bernalillo County District Attorney's Office to address the problem further.
DA Kari Brandenburg says her office has prosecuted nine parents for their truant children since 2004 but is more interested in student intervention than parent prosecution.
But with truancy still such a problem, Esquivel and Lucero didn't think the strategy is working.
 

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