Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, May 22, 1995 TAG: 9505220004
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BETH MACY/STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
A learning-disabled sixth-grader at Stonewall Jackson Middle School, Rogers reads below the third-grade level. She's never read a novel, preferring pictures to words - and TV to school.
``School is boring; it's too much work,'' she says.
So Samantha and her sister, Crystal, a seventh-grader at Jackson, devised a plan.
When their mom left for work in the morning, they left, too, walking toward the school. "We'd walk up to the alley, then go back home after she couldn't see us."
They spent their days indoors, Samantha watching cartoons or playing Nintendo on the upstairs tube, Crystal watching soap operas on the wide-screen downstairs. Their 17-year-old sister, who dropped out of school two years ago, sometimes called the school to say they were sick.
Crystal racked up 18 unexcused absences last semester, Samantha 17.
Truancy wasn't new to them. Samantha had missed 44 days in the fifth grade, 36 in the fourth, 48 days in first grade and 47 days in kindergarten.
What was new was the school's response.
Jackson Middle School took the girls to court.
\ Juvenile and Domestic Relations Court Judge Joseph Bounds remembers meeting Crystal and Samantha in January, their first appearance in court. ``They were defiant,'' he said. ``They wouldn't look at me. It was a complete lack of respect.''
He knew their mother, a single mom with five other children - all school drop-outs - had little control over her daughters.
He ordered the girls to school, the most he could do under Virginia law for a nondelinquent act. A month later, when their attendance didn't improve, school officials hauled the Rogers girls back for contempt - an offense that gave the judge more leeway, more teeth.
``I took one child, I knew she needed structure real quick, and I sent her to Sanctuary,'' Bounds says of Crystal's stay at the city's home for kids in crisis. ``Thank goodness it took.''
Word soon spread around the school: Jackson was getting tough on truancy. The judge sent five other truants to Coyner Springs detention center, two more to Sanctuary.
One girl, the skipping ``ringleader'' in the neighborhood, was sent to a group home outside the city. A parent was fined $250 dollars for educational neglect - and allowed to subtract $1 for each day her child attended.
Principal Charles Kennedy went to the home of one chronic truant - in bed at 1:30 in the afternoon - and brought her in for the remaining 30 minutes of school. ``He didn't even let her put her make-up on first; she thought that was awful,'' guidance counselor Sandra Wrobel recalls.
Judge Bounds began making rounds at the school, pulling kids out of class to pat them on the back for attending - and letting them know: I've got my eye on you.
This semester the Rogers girls have missed a few days each, all excused absences. Overall attendance at the school is up 18 percent.
At a recent court review, Bounds told the girls, ``Ladies, I'm mighty proud of you. It wasn't too happy when we first came in here, now was it?''
The girls responded in unison, ``No sir.''
\ Jackson handled truancy last year the way most schools handle it today. ``Before, there were no consequences,'' Kennedy, the principal, explains. ``No one had really operationalized truancy. We thought juvenile intake [the court] wouldn't take truancy charges, and they thought we wouldn't present them.''
Roanoke police were told a few years ago to let the schools and courts deal with truancy, a nondelinquent offense. They stopped their routine of picking up truants on the street.
``Everyone was willing to be a victim of not knowing how to deal with it,'' Kennedy says.
In the school's Southeast neighborhood, where just 49 percent of the adult population graduated from high school, Kennedy and Wrobel knew getting family support would be critical. Social workers joined the project, doing home visits and making family referrals for counseling, Medicaid, day-care agencies and substance-abuse treatment.
Bounds promised a spot on his docket for Jackson's truancy cases within two weeks of filing - most cases take four to six weeks to be heard. And the team of school and social-services workers worked on the hardest piece of all: the required court documentation, through weekly meetings, proving that all interventions had been exhausted.
``Truancy's a hard thing to fight because it takes a lot of resources,'' Kennedy says. ``We spend 40 to 60 man-hours on a case before it ever goes to court.''
The project has been most effective with such students as Crystal and Samantha - who are not involved in delinquent activity - but it hasn't touched the hard-core truants.
One of Jackson's recent daily absentee lists showed two students who'd missed more than 75 days this year. One has already been to court on drug charges and has a probation officer; the other has a long history of family problems.
``Truancy is just one part of all the dynamics at home, but what better place to target the family that needs help than at the school?'' Wrobel says.
With Jackson closed next year for renovations, project workers hope the program will be shifted to two elementary schools - where they say it has the greatest potential for success.
``I had both a first- and a third-grader in today for truancy, and it's not the child's fault,'' Bounds says. ``Truancy is just the tip of the iceberg, and you've got to be innovative enough to figure out what's below it.''
\ Samantha Rogers still doesn't like school. But her grades have improved with her attendance, and she understands what she reads a little better, too.
She believes she and her sister will be the first in their family to graduate. She says she wants to be a nurse - ``so I can take care of my mama, so she won't have to go to a nursing home.''
Her mother, a nursing assistant, became pregnant and dropped out of school when she was Samantha's age. In an interview in her neat, two-story home, she said she doesn't remember why Samantha and Crystal missed so many days in kindergarten and first grade. She asked that her name not be used.
She credits Sanctuary, where the entire family received counseling, with turning her daughters around. She wishes the Jackson project had been available when her other five children were in school.
The girls' mother ``took the attitude that `Trust me, this will change,''' recalls the family's Sanctuary counselor, Diane Campbell. ``She didn't rescue them; she didn't say to the judge, `Please let her come home.'''
She's even been supervising the girls' homework and personally driving them to school. ``She makes me practice my spelling for two hours now,'' says Samantha, who raised her spelling grade from an F to an A.
Samantha may not like school, but she's learning to tolerate it. ``Because I don't want to go to Sanctuary, and I'm afraid they'll put my mom in jail if I don't go.
``Mama said, `Y'all go to school because if I have to go to jail there'll be no one to take care of you.'''
COMING IN TUESDAY EXTRA: A profile of Greg Bundick and Teresa Harmon, two school drop-outs who are dropping back in at alternative education's Drop-In Academy - and plan to be among the first from their school to advance to college.
by CNB