Earlier this week in the Los Angeles Times there was an editorial article titled "Taking Care of Truants" that discusses the new changes to the truant student program for Los Angeles. The program used to entail truant students receiving rather expensive tickets for being truant from school. Officers were even reported waiting on busy routes to school to write tickets for students that were even running late to school, but were obviously on their way to campus. The program was supposed to provide a way for counselors, principals, parents, and the like to find out why students were not in school so that they could provide the proper resources to ensure that more children stayed in school and continued on the graduation. The program did not always work that way because it usually frustrated everyone involved and the process of going to court, paying hefty fines, and dealing with missing more school has made the program very difficult to not only manage by for students to navigate. This usually resulted in students dropping out rather then continuing on with their education.
A new program that is being proposed will hopefully benefit everyone involved. The new program will not hand out hefty tickets, but will rather focus on counseling tardy and truant students instead. In order for a program like this to work though, the district will need to also implement a disciplinary program that will replace the use of tickets. The program will be used for repeated truancy offenders and other minor rule-breaking. With mandatory counseling for truant students hopefully it will help to get to the root of the students problems and provide them with ways to better ensure that they are at school.
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