On any given day in Chicago, from the time the morning tardy bell rings until the last buzzer goes off in the afternoon, there are an estimated 35,000 children missing from their seats in public school classrooms.
At least one third of them are truant. Chronically truant. They are children under 16 who aren`t just skipping a day of school here and there. They are children who simply don`t go.
Some of them are truant because their parents don`t care. Their mothers never bothered to wake them up in time for school, or prepare clean clothes to wear, or help them with homework–so the kids spend their days lounging about the house, watching game shows and soap operas.
Some are kept home to babysit for their younger brothers and sisters while the mother goes on her way. Some have medical problems, such as needing eyeglasses or hearing aids, that the family never attended to. Or some got beaten up, given a black eye or were sexually abused by the man of the house when he showed up drunk the night before.
Other children are truant because they themselves no longer care. They`d rather do something that`s easy and more fun than school–like hang out on street corners with the big guys and drink booze out of a paper sack. Get stoned. Roam alleys. Jump turnstiles at ”L” stations. Mix with neighborhood gang members who skip school, too. Steal hubcaps. Lift a few items from a store. Have sex. Hustle on the street. Anything to break the boredom and find action.
Experts in and out the education field say that the fight against such absences was weakened two years ago by a new state law that removed the authority of judges to act in cases of chronic truancy.
”In essence, that bill abolished compulsory education in Illinois,”
says Circuit Judge John Steigmann of Champaign County, who was an ardent opponent of the change in the law that removed truants from court.
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There are at least 10,000 chronic truants in Chicago. But that figure from the board of education is considered conservative by many experts, who believe the figure is closer to 15,000.
Day after day, these children learn nothing. For each day they miss class, they fall behind in terms of education, discipline, socialization and self-esteem. For each day they are truant, they have a harder time fitting in when they come back–which feeds their truancy again.
In an era when new attention is being directed to the dramatic problem of high school dropouts, considerably less is being aimed at what breeds it:
truancy.
”Kids don`t just drop out of school when they hit 16 because they have a job,” says one Chicago truant officer. ”They drop out because they have nothing going for them. There is no such thing as a dropout. That`s the wrong word. They are fade-outs.
”By the time they are 16, they`ve been fading out of the system for years. Dropping out is only the end result of fading out and it begins with truancy in 1st and 2d grade.”
On January 1, 1983, Senate Bill 623 changed Illinois law so that the juvenile courts no longer had the authority to deal with habitual truants.
Previously, a judge could place truants under supervision with a provision that they must go to school every day. But the change in the law turned the responsibility of truants away from the courts and over to local social agencies. The agencies have jurisdiction to intervene in the truant`s case, but have no authority to enforce cooperation from the truant or his family.
”There is still a compulsory education law in Illinois but the law that allowed the juvenile courts to enforce it was wiped off the slates,”
Steigmann said. ”There is no way to enforce the law requiring Illinois children to go to school and the kids know it.”
”I`m having deans of high schools call me up every day saying, `Can`t you do something about truants?` ” says Macon County Circuit Judge John Davis of Decatur. ”I have to tell them the court can no longer do a thing. I tell the deans the only thing they can do is have the parents write their state reps or senators and have the law changed back again.”
”You ask any adult in the state of Illinois if they know they can`t make their kids go to school anymore and they wouldn`t believe you, but it is true,” says attorney Kathy Ryan, former supervising state`s attorney for Cook County in juvenile court.
”The change in the law took away the bottom line,” says Jan Chmela, who works for the Chicago Board of Education`s Truancy Alternative Program and has been both a teacher and a truant officer.
”Nobody is advocating locking up children who are truants,” she says.
”There are all sorts of social agencies who can intervene and help. . . . But if there is a law that says children must go to school up until 16, there has to be a bottom line you use after every other effort has failed.”
State Senator Aldo De Angelis (R., Olympia Fields) sponsored the bill that changed the law. Although he admits he often is ”blistered” for it, he defends it.
”The court has never been a remedy for truancy. With truants, you are not dealing with delinquents who`ve committed a crime, you are dealing with kids who haven`t gone to school. You are dealing with a troubled adolescent,” De Angelis says.
”There has been no crime committed and they should not have to end up in court. You have to find out what the root problem is behind the truancy. Fear of the courts does not correct truancy.”
Although De Angelis said statewide truancy rates have dropped since the law changed, Illinois State Board of Education figures show an increase.
Chronic truancy during the 1982-1983 school year, when the law changed, was reported at 18,306 throughout Illinois. The following school year, 1983-1984, it rose to 21,243.
Tom Greyson, of the state school board truancy program, concedes, ”It is no longer a law in Illinois to make kids go to school–to use the courts as a threat to go to school. Just forcing them there doesn`t mean they are going to learn.
”There are compulsory education laws that have been there for 100 years,” Greyson adds. ”If the law is there, we need an enforcement mechanism. But the courts should be the very last resort.”
Nicole Storch, dean of Centennial High School in Champaign, said the courts–after all counseling and other efforts failed–were a good last resort.
”The point is to get them back in school. If people knew what was happening to these kids who are truant, how they are being exploited and used and abused out on the streets when they should be in school, they`d scream louder than the ones who didn`t think kids should be forced to learn,” she said.
In Chicago, which suffers the bulk of the state`s dropout problem as well as chronic truancy–dropout rates in Chicago are more than twice what they are Downstate–a shortage of truancy personnel often cripples attempts to track down the kids who are missing from school.
There are 174 truant officers serving 495 elementary schools and 64 high schools. All truant officers handling high schools in Chicago are assigned to two. Many officers for elementary schools are assigned to three.
”We desperately need more truant officers just to find these kids,”
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says truant officer Rubin Torres, who is assigned to Austin and Clemente High Schools, the latter of which has one of the city`s highest dropout rates.
”Because if we don`t find them, nobody else will.”
”Taking that law off the books was crazy,” says one Chicago truant officer. ”It`s easier now to put people in the penitentiary than it is to make them go to school. And the penitentiary is just about where a lot of them land because they never finished school and can`t get a job.”
Illinois is one of the few states that no longer uses the juvenile courts to compel a child to go to school.
The authority for dealing with the truancy problem has been placed into a network of social agencies, police youth divisions, school psychiatric programs and statewide agencies such as the Department of Children and Family Services.
”Being truant may not be committing a crime or hurting another person,” says one Chicago truant officer. ”It`s worse. These kids are hurting themselves. They are cutting off any future they could ever have, any escape from poverty they might have gotten through an education.
”And we`re sitting here letting them do it and saying: `Don`t worry. You won`t get in trouble or have to go to court or answer to a judge.`
”But, I ask you, what do we do with them when they are grown?”