Program Shows Results for Some Chronic Truants

ORANGE — Smart, self-assured and bored, 15-year-old Steven was on a two-week spree of carefree living last January--ditching school, skateboarding with his friends and “just kickin’ back”--when police picked him up for truancy.

They took him to the Truancy Learning Center at Richland High School in Orange and called his mother to get him.

Lectures followed. They didn’t sink in.

“I don’t really see how ditching’s so bad,” Steven said recently. (His mother asked that their last name not be used.) “If you don’t want to go to school that day, then you don’t want to learn that day. That’s all there is to it.”

Although nothing can change Steven’s creed that teachers don’t care about him, that education is a joke and that school is a major bore, the truancy program, he said, is working for him. After he went to the center, the school district acknowledged his scorn for structure and steered him to its independent study program. It also provided counseling.

Now Steven goes to regular school every Tuesday and is free the rest of the week. It is a step the center sees as better than nothing, although counselors said they always urge students to attend regular school.

The Orange program is modeled on the 3-year-old Truancy Reduction Program in Garden Grove, which Gov. Pete Wilson visited and praised this month. Both centers have had overwhelming success; short-term tracking shows that more than 90% of students brought in return to school.

The Garden Grove program, funded by a government grant and administered by Orange County Youth and Family Services, has seen 892 students since it opened. In Orange, 995 students have been brought to the center, which is funded by the city.

Only 7% of students taken to the Garden Grove center have had another contact with the police, and, correspondingly, daytime property crimes in the city have dropped about 15%.

“Not only does it mean the kids don’t get involved in crimes as suspects, but that they’re not victims either, because the program discourages loitering,” said Garden Grove Police Lt. Kevin Rainey.

But most of all, kids who don’t seem to fit into high school often find the help they need.

Every day, police officers in both cities sweep the streets or favorite teen hang-outs, arresting students who should be in school and bringing them to the centers. Their parents are called, and a counselor tries to determine why they are truant.

Students are assessed for depression and anger, and their attendance records and grades are checked. If they need tutoring, the center arranges it, and all students are offered counseling on a sliding fee scale that begins at a minimum of $1 per session. Classes are not held at the centers.

Some traits are common among truant teens, counselors said. Many are doing poorly in school and are tired of struggling to catch up. Some ditch on a dare or for a lark, but others are in gangs, are using drugs or have family problems.

“Many of the kids I see have very poor relationships with their parents,” said Tracie Cord, a teacher at the Garden Grove Center. “They don’t feel like they make a difference in their families.”

Also, many truant teens come from low-income families with no money for private tutors or psychiatrists, said Leah Graber, counseling intern at the Garden Grove center.

Parents, however, often know their children are troubled before they receive a call from the center, Graber said.

“But there are some parents who are so wrapped up in doing what they need to do to survive that they’re really not aware of what’s going on,” she said. “It can come as a total shock to them when we call.”

Steven’s mother, Donna, knew he had become bored by school, but said she had no idea he had been ditching so much.

Donna is not sure how it happened; in elementary school he was in a program for gifted and talented students. Even now, he rarely studies but does well on tests. She has watched his slide into indifference with alarm, once even calling the police to ask them to talk to him.

When the center called her to say Steven was there, “my heart just jumped to my stomach,” Donna said. “I kept asking myself, if there was something I should have said that I didn’t say or maybe something I said that I shouldn’t have?”

His mother is not the problem, Steven said. His teachers are.

He recounted how a math teacher once asked him at the beginning of the semester if he planned to do any work. He answered no, actually did no work, but got a C anyway. It was more proof that school is a waste of his time, Steven said.

In a way, Steven’s mother sees his point.

“It’s true that they don’t really care,” Donna said. She noted that his school never even called her to say that Steven had not been there for two weeks.

“Adults to him are a joke--they’re irresponsible large people,” she said.

Sixteen-year-old Lydia, by contrast, has little of Steven’s anger or alienation.

One day when she saw some friends wandering from the Richland campus, she decided to follow. The group went to hang out at a friend’s house and were caught by police as they walked back to school.

“At the time, I didn’t think it mattered,” Lydia said. “But now that I got arrested for it, it seems like a big deal to me.”

The program in Orange has helped Lydia refocus her attention on education, she said, and she is glad she was brought there.

“I’m off independent study next week, and I can’t wait,” Lydia said. “I’d rather be in school like the rest of the kids. Now I just want to go to school and do better.”

Lydia’s father, Ricardo, said he hopes the entire experience has made her want to stay in school. He does not have a high school diploma, and said life has been difficult.

Recently, he went back to school and found himself struggling to figure out the same math his daughter was learning.

“She said, ‘Dad that’s what I’m studying right now. I’ll sit down and help you.’ I said to her, doesn’t that tell you more than anything that you need an education? Or do you want to end up like me?”