TUJUNGA - Ferris Bueller might have never had his infamous “day off” had he been a student at Verdugo Hills High.
At this Tujunga school you’ll find administrators and school police officers walking the perimeter of the school every morning to drag straggling students to class. Counselors and office workers also wrangle students who have been absent without an excuse, in an effort to nip the habit early.
If none of that works, the school starts an escalating citation program to drill the message into truants.
Students such as Vanessa Davis, who graduated from Verdugo Hills last year, credit the program with helping them get back on track in school.
“It scared me into action,” said Davis, now a student at California State University, Chico.
Last year alone, the Los Angeles School Police Department issued 4,000 truancy tickets. That figure does not include tickets issued by other law enforcement agencies.
With city and school district officials looking to curb truancy districtwide, Verdugo Hills is being eyed as a model.
The school’s program allows administrators to hand out citations to students who have missed class without an excuse more than four times.
The citations do not have any fines attached to them, but after receiving four a student can receive a truancy ticket under a deal worked out with the District Attorney’s Office, school police and the local court system.
At most other schools, students can only get the truancy tickets - which carry a $250 fine plus court fees - if they are caught off-campus and out of class.”We decided that we wanted kids to understand there were real consequences to them showing up late to missing class,” said Arturo Barcenas, assistant principal at Verdugo Hills.
In some cases, the school has also handed out the citations if parents let administrators know that a student stayed home and missed class without permission.
“We have 2,100 students. You just can’t monitor every kid’s move,” Barcenas said.
“This puts more of the responsibility on the student.”
Studies have shown that kids who consistently skip class are at a higher risk of dropping out of school.
According to one estimate from the U.S. Department of Education, 80 percent of all high school dropouts were truant the year before they left school.
Local elected officials have been floating ideas to improve efforts to curb truancy. Many argue that it is one of the most effective ways to increase LAUSD’s high school graduation rate, which some say is as low as 50 percent.
“This laissez-faire attitude we have had towards school participation has let these bad values in kids to become more prevalent,” said Los Angeles Councilman Tom LaBonge.
LaBonge recently introduced a motion that would have made it legal for police officers to ticket truant students on school campuses. The effort was supported by LAUSD school board member Tamar Galatzan, who is also a deputy city attorney.
LaBonge and Galatzan have since pulled back on their efforts, but both agree that the issue is a priority and vital to improving social welfare in the city.
“This is something I see every day both as school board member and as a neighborhood prosecutor,” Galatzan said.
“Kids need to be in school during the school day, and the city and the district need to support the efforts made by schools to make that happen.”
School districts also receive a majority of their funding based on their daily attendance rates, so in a down economy the incentive to get kids to class is even stronger.
Many community organizations criticize efforts like that of Verdugo Hills, though, claiming that truancy is a symptom of a bigger problem that should be addressed with intervention, not with tickets and fines.
“This issue should be handled by schools, not enforced by police and courts,” said Manuel Criollo, an organizer with the Community Rights Campaign, which advocated for the decriminalization of truancy.
“Twenty years ago we didn’t handle this issue in that way, and we think parents, students and administrators can come up with alternatives beyond these limited tools.”
Criollo also said many times students are ticketed when they shouldn’t be. Like 17-year-old Cleveland High School student Diana Mercado, who was given a ticket when she was in middle school during the immigration walkouts of 2006.
“Our teachers all knew we were going to march for our immigrant parents,” Mercado said. “I felt I had to be there.”
For students who are ticketed for skipping class, Mercado suggests more counseling and less ticketing.
“The police should stay out of it and leave it to the schools. They are not fixing the problem by giving kids fines,” she said.
Galatzan, who is expected to address the truancy issue at a board meeting later this month, said part of the problem currently is that there is no districtwide policy to deal with kids missing school.
“For a district that mandates everything, it seems strange that there isn’t a truancy policy for the district,” Galatzan said.
District officials said currently the district only defines what a truant student is, and has general guidelines for contacting parents, but policy now allows each school to deal with it on their own.
Renee Gonzalez, LAUSD’s assistant superintendent of student health and human services, said the district’s priority is to use intervention to prevent truancy, and rely on criminal enforcement as a last resort.
Administrators at Verdugo Hills insist that their program is a strategic intervention effort that gives students and the adults who oversee them plenty of opportunities to fix the problems, before any penalties are involved.
The school even allows some students to work off their citations, and administrators will remove them if they see improvements in their students.
But perhaps more importantly, the program has gotten adults to work together to get more kids to school and class.
“If this program wasn’t in place, I wouldn’t have a chance to sit down with so many students,” said Jonathan Hayes, an assistant principal at Verdugo Hills.
“By the time I’m done dealing with these students, I have spoken to them for 30 minutes and many times gotten down to the reason they’ve been missing class, and I get a commitment from them to do better.”