Although the Los Angeles Unified School District has ramped up its efforts to keep students in school, a new report shows that thousands are still skipping class routinely, and the problem is rampant in a few low-performing schools.
The report is the first in what is intended as a series of monthly accounts that will track truancy and absenteeism in every middle and high school in the district -- something that has not been done in such a systematic way before.
The information is considered critical because students typically begin skipping school sporadically before dropping out altogether. L.A. Unified is trying to tackle a dropout rate that is officially 24.1% but has been estimated at close to double that.
Several numbers leap out of the first report, which tracked students who missed school in January.
A single school, Washington Preparatory High School near Inglewood, had 170 students with 10 or more "unresolved" absences that month. Another, Belmont High, just west of downtown, had 167. An unresolved absence is one for which a student does not bring a written excuse and the school doesn't contact the parents.
And a middle school, Bethune in South L.A., listed 335 students with three or more truancies, far more than any other school. A truancy is an unauthorized absence, one for which the school has determined that the student had no legitimate excuse.
An assistant principal at Belmont, John Newton, said the school, where 4,045 students are enrolled, welcomed the report. "It should allow us to improve student attendance and track down those students who may drop out because of attendance problems," he said. "So we think it will be a real benefit, even though it looks negative the first month."
One reason the number of absences may be so high, Newton said, is that the district has rolled out a new computerized attendance system that keeps track of students' presence in every class. Before, attendance was taken once a day, in homeroom.
"So we literally have, in a school this size, thousands of attendance marks every day," he said. That means, among other things, that whenever a student cuts a single class, it is classified as an absence. Without an excuse, it becomes "unresolved."
Bethune's assistant principal, Beverly Byrd, said the high numbers at her school, which enrolls 2,300 students, were partly the result of an especially tough approach to absences fostered by the school's participation in an anti-truancy program run by the city attorney's office. Under that program, Operation Bright Futures, absent students were declared truant unless they returned to school with a note from a doctor, she said.
