Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, August 7, 1995                   TAG: 9508290069
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

WHAT TO DO ABOUT SCHOOL DROP-INS

They've concluded that visiting teachers, home-school counselors, human-relations specialists and other school-based types attempting to keep kids from skipping classes need a helping hand from the long arm of the law. So police officers have been given special missions: On school days, they cruise neighborhoods, walk through shopping centers, comb hangouts and pick up youngsters who are supposed to be in school.

In most cities, the officers don't take the kids to the police department. They take them to centers set up to counsel truants - and to counsel parents when they come to the centers to collect their kids.

There are several good reasons to crack down on truants. Here are two:

nThe link between truancy and juvenile crime - including drug use - is well-established. The link between truancy and dropping out is also well-established, and dropping out is linked to numerous social pathologies.

nTeachers can't teach students who aren't in school. Chronic hooky-players, those who drop in on classes only on a whim to see their friends, typically flunk tests and are most apt to become dropouts. They not only are cheating themselves out of an education. They're cheating taxpayers who pay for that education, and threatening the community's future prosperity in a knowledge-driven economy.

Like most school systems, Roanoke city's and Roanoke County's are experiencing increased student absenteeism. Should they join in calling for class-cutter cops? It may come to that.

As Roanoke's schools Superintendent Wayne Harris points out, the community needs to recognize that not all chronically absent kids are truants. That is, they're not officially AWOL if their parents are providing written excuses and winks and nods for them to skip classes, tests and assignments.

``No time to do your homework, honey? No problem. Have a headache - I'll give you a note.''

The occasional big family vacation that requires a student to miss a few school days is one thing. If the student makes up missed school work, the harm may not be great.

But too many parents make a practice of pulling their kids out of school for the parents' own convenience. And too many other parents aid and abet youngsters' skipping for no good reason - even fibbing to the schools about the absence. The resulting education that some students get is from their parents - in how to flout the rules.

So let's have a communitywide crackdown on truants, and hold the schools partly accountable as well. Let's get the police more involved, too, and return to the days of truant officers. But, we'll say it for the umpteenth time, the solution begins with parental responsibility.