New Mexico in Focus; Truancy Issues

Well, Chris, thanks for joining us when we started looking at the idea of attendance, this very basic principle of getting kids into school. APS, there are numbers have actually been improving last year, it's about a little under 13% of the year before, it's a little bit more than that, so you're having some success. Yeah, truancy has been an issue, not just statewide, but nationally, and we do know that if kids aren't in school, they can't learn. And so trying to deal with that and figure out what to do to help get truancy kids back in school and keep them there is really important. It seems driven by a number of factors, that income seems to be a pretty important one, and in a state like ours, I can only imagine that takes an outsize role. Well, I think that there are many factors, and so we have a project that we're beginning to implement a pilot program to really dig down to the why behind truancy, and some

of those things may be systematic, wise, but mostly it's going to be individual, why? Individual with the student, individual with the student and their family, why is the kid not coming to school? And until you know that, you really can't address the issue, that's all you're addressing is the problem, you can't address what's causing the problem. You said it's going to be 14 schools when we had talked a little bit earlier throughout APS. All high schools or what's this going to be? No, the 14 schools are a mixture of elementary, middle, and high, and it's actually spread out across the district, so it's not one area of the city versus another area. It's looking at a modified case management approach. And so taking kids at five unexcused absences and bringing them in and their families in and figuring out, digging down to the why behind it. And I would actually say the why is because it's probably more than one reason. Kids don't live in a vacuum, it's probably not one reason. There may be multiple reasons.

And then coming up with an intervention plan that everybody agrees to. The school agrees to, the parents agree to, the student agrees to, that this is the plan to get the child back in school and to keep them there. The way this looks to a student or a family must, that has to be the hardest part of your job, when you have to go to someone and say, hey, you aren't following the rules. The law forces you and New Mexico to do that at five unexcused absences, you have to step in and attend, they're considered habitually true. What are those exchanges like with parents? Is there a lot of pushback? This isn't a punitive. It's a positive saying, we want you to come in, we want to engage in a conversation around this. We want to figure out what's going on and to see what we can do to help you and your child get back into school. It's a different conversation than saying, if you don't come, then we're going to do x, y, and z. Early intervention is at five unexcused absences, before they're down to ten, which now they're habitually true and that's a whole different ball game when you get there and it's a whole different ball game educationally.

Once a child's missed that much school, even if we get them back, getting them caught up is harder, it's much harder and sometimes it's not possible, depending on where it is in the school year. And so we don't want to lose kids, we want to get them back sooner, we want to work on with the parents and figure out what to do and hopefully to install a vision that school is important and every day matters, so you have to be there, it all counts. Right. What's out there in the community, whether it's individuals, programs that are set up, what helps you get your hooks back into those kids and get them interested? We've actually mapped our school and community resources, so we could do a mapping of Albuquerque and all the resources there, but if you're down in the southeast heights and the only resource you need is up in the northeast heights, chances are it's unassessable. And so what we've done is done some mapping around the school community, so when the teams come together and meet with the family, they actually have a book of resources in that area that they can refer to, that they can talk about, did you know that this existed

here and parents say, I don't even know that existed. From a parental perspective that has to be, maybe a little bit refreshing, what do you tell those parents who are like, I don't know what to do, I've got my hands full, I can't be driving around at 10.30 in the morning looking for my kid? Well, I think that's the whole idea of the pilot, is to do it a case management, the team that they're coming to is called their health and wellness teams, and so they're coming together with a group of people in the school that can help them, so it's the counselor, the nurse, teachers, can be part of that administrators, depending on the individual kid and the capacity of the school, there are different people that can assist them. They may have a social worker already assigned to that child, and so the social worker might be at the table. So there's different ways, and so it's a group of people, it's not just one person trying to figure out, well, I can't be doing that, or maybe my issue is, I have to leave early in the morning to get off to work, and there's no one there to make sure my kid gets off

to school, so what can we do to help you? Is there somebody else in your life that might be able to, that doesn't leave as early to work that can show up to make sure your kid got off to school? And tell you know the why, you can't figure out what are the possibilities, and it's sort of on a parallel tracks, what are systematic issues? Are we going to see a huge number of kids that this is the why, and is it something that the school, that we as a district can deal with, or is it something that we reach out to the community and say, look, this is like a huge number of the reasons. We need your help community, we need to figure out what can we do for community supports, because if this is the reason kids aren't coming to school, we all need to step up. It's going to be great to see some of those solutions and see what you find out over this next year. Chris, thanks for coming in. All right, thank you. This program is part of American Graduate, let's make it happen, a public media initiative made possible by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.