Hennepin county truancy cases may get new emphasis

The Hennepin County attorney's office seeks to expand its program for getting truants back in school, hoping that this will curb crime down the road.

By MARY JANE SMETANKA, Star Tribune

Last update: October 1, 2009 - 11:50 PM

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In an effort to catch and reform truants before they grow up to be criminals, Hennepin County is planning to consolidate its anti-truancy programs in the county attorney's office.

Since the Education for Success program began in 2007, nearly half of the students who have participated in it improved their attendance enough to succeed in school. The program is run out of the county attorney's office, which is responsible for child neglect and truancy cases that result when kids miss too much school.

County Attorney Mike Freeman told county commissioners in a briefing Thursday that 98 percent of juvenile felons are truants first. "They commit crimes at 15 or 16 or 17 years old, but they were truant at 6, 7 and 8," he said. "Part of my job is crime prevention and keeping kids in school."

Other county departments, including corrections and human services, deal with issues linked to truancy. If the county board approves, the budget for Education for Success will jump next year from about $1 million to about $3 million through a budget shift that would move funding from corrections and human services to a designated budget within Freeman's office. No new money would go to the program.

Five Minneapolis elementary schools and one each in Richfield and Brooklyn Center are using the program. Freeman said he hopes that the bigger budget will allow the program to expand to most elementary schools in the county.

"This is earlier and more intense intervention," he said. "We are attendance hounds. We're not trying to be social workers."

Now, the county gets involved in truancy cases once a child has seven unexcused absences. Cases involving children 11 and under go to child protection; those involving kids 12 and up become truancy cases. In 2007-08, the county received 700 school reports of child neglect where school attendance was one of the issues. That same year, about 1,000 truancy petitions involving older kids went to the county attorney.

Truancy cases can get tangled up in assessments that are complex, time-consuming and expensive, and which are meant to identify other family issues, Freeman said. With all truancy cases going to his office, he said, a quick assessment can determine if truancy is the only issue before kids end up in court.

Generally, schools handle attendance issues if kids miss school for unknown reasons up to five times in a year. In Education for Success, parents are asked to meet with representatives of the county attorney's office, the school and county social services after a child has six unexcused absences. If a child has nine unexcused absences, they meet to draw up an attendance contract. More aggressive action is taken if the meetings don't get results.

Freeman said meetings with parents often do get results. Children may be missing school for reasons as simple as lacking an alarm clock. In some families, school can be seen as a luxury by single moms who are raising multiple kids alone and relying on older children to care for younger siblings while struggling with health, job and poverty issues.

Elementary age children tend to be easy to work with, he said, because they want to go to school with their friends and most want to learn. Instead of directing truant teens into court, the plan is to assign them to community groups that the county already contracts with and that specialize in improving attendance. That should relieve some of the burden on juvenile courts, Freeman said.

If the county board approves the budget shift this fall, the expanded program should begin in the fall of 2010.

Mary Jane Smetanka • 612-673-7380

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