`TRIAGE’ FOR HUB TRUANTS; Attendance Officer’s Average Caseload: 800

By MARIE SZANISZLO

Boston Public Schools have failed to replace five truant officers who have departed since 2002, leaving five overburdened staffers to keep track of as many as 4,000 chronic classroom ditchers each year, a Herald review has found.

"It’s triage," said Lucille Fonseca, the district’s supervisor of attendance. "You just have to make a professional judgment as to which are the most urgent cases. That’s simply all you can do."

Five so-called attendance officers have retired or quit in the past five years, and the district, for financial reasons, has opted not to replace them, according to Phil Jackson, a former school psychologist who is now the district’s truancy czar.

As a result, the average caseload for the remaining officers in a system with more than 57,000 students has doubled to about 800 cases, Fonseca said.

And the average turnaround time – how long it takes for the district or a judge to corral the kid back into school – has nearly quadrupled, from one week to as much as one month.

The lag in time can be a prescription for disaster, officials say, because there is a narrow window of opportunity to prevent today’s truant from becoming tomorrow’s dropout.

"Once they start falling behind, they fall into an abyss," said MBTA Police Lt. Detective Mark Gillespie. All told, one in five Boston Public Schools students in the class of 2006 dropped out, according to figures released last week by the Massachusetts Department of Education.

And once a student drops out, studies show, he or she is less likely to find a job, and more likely to become either the victim or the perpetrator of a crime. "It costs us all," said Jackson.

"Incarceration simply costs more than education."

The way the system currently works is that after a student has five unexcused absences from school the truant officer will try to contact the parents – by phone, by mail and finally by visiting the kid’s home.

If the student persists and has five more unexcused absences, then the truant officer could go so far as to file a CHINS Child In Need of Supervision (CHINS) petition with a judge, who could order the student to report to a probation officer.

Boston is attempting to address its truancy problem, Jackson said, partly by dividing large high schools into multiple smaller schools "where the staff can get to know more about their students than just their grades."

But there are no immediate plans to increase the number of attendance officers, he said.

"We’re doing the best we can with what we have," Jackson said. "But we could always use more."

Once a week, to help out, Gillespie and a team of police, street workers, clergy and others descend on a different T station during the day, approach truants, counsel them and send letters notifying their parents and school headmasters that they’ve skipped school.

Chris Troy, founder and president of the Boston Urban Youth Foundation, a faith-based nonprofit, said the district also needs more alternative-school options for students who don’t thrive in a regular classroom setting.

"A lot of students don’t see much of a future for themselves, so they feel: Why bother?" Troy said. "The good news is that it’s a solvable problem. The trick is getting them to see that, getting them to see that education is the pathway to their future."

CAPTION: BOSTON LAGS: Teacher Reggie Leonard leads a class at the Juvenile Resource Center in Pittsfield, where the teacher-to- student ratio is 14 to 500. In Hub public schools, the ratio of truant officers to students is 5 to 400.

CAPTION: SECOND CHANCE ON SECOND STREET: Pittsfield Sheriff Carmen C. Massimiano helped open the Juvenile Resource Center in 2003. CAPTION: LEADING, LEARINING: John Quinn Jr. superintendent fo the Berkshire County Jail and House of Correction, counsels a student at the Juvenile Resource Center in Pittsfield. The community’s novel approach to truancy gives kids specialized lesson plans and attention, and has reduced the truancy rate by 10 percent.

STAFF PHOTOS BY TED FITZGERALD

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