¶¶Ňőh

One out of every 3 East Baton Rouge Parish public school students were chronically absent in 2024, meaning more than 13,000 kids in the district missed class at least 10% of the year.Ěý

When combined with K-12 public schools in the eight surrounding parishes, an estimated children fall into the same category.Ěý

Decades of research suggest those numbers don't bode well for crime.

¶¶Ňőh lawmakers began focusing on the issue in the late 1990s. In an attempt to address the state's overcrowded prisons, state Sen. Chris Ullo asked LSU’s School of Social Work to identify a single factor that could help keep kids out of jail.

For former LSU researcher Cecile Guin, the idea of such a silver bullet seemed absurd.

“We were dying laughing,” Guin said. “He wanted us to find one thing.”

But Guin, for a dissertation, had tracked more than 800 individuals in the state's juvenile justice system between 1974 and 1989. Reanalyzing that data a decade later, Guin found something: “We finally told him the best thing he could do was educate them in the early years of school.”

Last March, the Baton Rouge Area Foundation dove into education and criminal justice data from 2007 to 2022. It found that in East Baton Rouge Parish, men ages 19 to 29 committed 70% of the murders. Within that group, 80% went to Baton Rouge public schools, and only 3 out of 10 finished high school. When they were enrolled in school, they were often absent.

“By the time they are getting arrested, it's kind of too late,” said Lakita Leonard, a juvenile public defender in East Baton Rouge. “Then I find out they haven’t been to school in years.”

The Baton Rouge Area Foundation’s key takeaway is strikingly similar to Guin’s 35 years earlier: Early intervention is the most important factor. Literacy struggles in elementary school, math difficulties in middle school and behavioral issues throughout grade school make it harder to manage the problem.

“It's just sad, because I wrote that dissertation in 1989, and if you read it, it could be today,” Guin said.

While less severe than chronic absenteeism, truancy — defined as five or more unexcused absences in a semester — remains high across ¶¶Ňőh even as rates have generally declined around the country. Statewide, 41.8% of students were truant in the 2023-24 school year, according to the Education Department. For East Baton Rouge public schools, those numbers have fluctuated between 55% and 60% since 2020.

“In East Baton Rouge Parish, we’re not getting them in the room,” Sen. Rick Edmonds said in a recent state Senate hearing on education. “We are in crisis mode.”

Cuts hinder efforts

The legislative focus on truancy in the late 1990s led to the creation of the Truancy Assessment and Service Center. TASC is a taxpayer-funded statewide program for Louisian’s most at-risk K-5 students. Schools have recommended over 900,000 children to the program.

From the moment a child presents attendance problems, school staff notify TASC, which can help the most at-risk families. Case managers assist with anything from school uniforms to navigating housing and health care resources. The first step though, is locating the family — often a challenge with changing addresses and phone numbers, said Jennie Ponder, the program’s director: “It's just the nature of the beast.”

Ponder’s office has uncovered 9-year-olds who never sat in a classroom. When families are in survival mode, prioritizing education tends to take a back seat, especially when parents struggled with school themselves, she said.

“Insufficient housing, transportation, income, high mobility; lots of homelessness, substance abuse, incarcerations, evictions, all those things impact the kids we deal with,” Ponder said. “The only way that any of us in this program are going to make a difference is in some way we change the mindset of that family.”

A study in 2006-07 found TASC reduced truancy by 1.9% among high-risk students, while truancy increased by 0.7% among students just below the threshold for TASC intervention — a statistically significant, albeit modest, result.

“It showed the program was working,” said Judith Rhodes, one of the authors of the study. “We knew that the kids who were receiving the intervention were coming back to school."

A few years after TASC opened its doors, a federal judge lifted Baton Rouge’s 47-year desegregation order in 2003. That same year, Zachary and Baker created their own school districts, with Central following suit in 2007.

Simultaneously, charter schools began to gain prominence, further chipping away at enrollment and funding in traditional public schools. The city’s current educational landscape presents families with more options. Some argue that increased choice has left many children behind.

“You have a public school system that is cratering,” Guin said. “And the children that are left to go to the public schools are the ones that need the most help.”

As funding shrank, so did truancy programs.

In 2013, amid education funding cuts, the administration of Gov. Bobby Jindal directed LSU to end its involvement with TASC across the state. Baton Rouge’s TASC program went from serving 63 elementary schools at the time to just 16. Three case managers now handle more than 100 families each.

Currently overseen by the ¶¶Ňőh Commission on Law Enforcement, TASC now faces a $1.9 million cut in recurring funding from the state Legislature, slashing statewide operations by an estimated 45%.

Adding more pressure to the system are noticeable shifts in attitude. Tirzah Smith, director Child Welfare and Attendance for East Baton Rouge Public schools since 2008, says the value of education has slipped further away from many familiesĚý— a change exacerbated by online schooling during the pandemic. Like TASC, her agency prioritizes early intervention but also works with middle and high school students.Ěý

“We have a lot of young parents,” Smith said. “A lot think, �I can just keep my kids at home.'”

Poverty, truancy linked

Gail Grover's first job after graduating from law school in 1999 was as a prosecutor handling juvenile cases. Now she is one of two judges for East Baton Rouge Parish Juvenile Court.

“Whenever there is a crunch in funding, it's the first thing that gets cut," she said. "Then we wonder in five years why we’re having a problem.”

With each natural disaster, administrative shift and school reorganization, she has seen efforts slip.

“It's like a pause and a setback,” she said. “If there is not a double-down effort to go get them, then they slip further and further away.”

If other efforts fail to improve a student's attendance, the District Attorney's Office may assign the family a probation officer from the city's Family in Need of Services agencyĚýin an attempt to avoid taking them to court. By the time courts step in, kids can have 40 to 50 absences a year, Grover said.

When that happens in elementary school, students struggle to learn to read, making it nearly impossible to grasp more advanced concepts later, Grover said. By the time they reach high school age, those without a solid base face an almost irreversible turning point, she said.

“It's not uncommon to have a 16-year-old in the sixth grade,” added Leonard, the public defender. “At that point, it's really difficult to get that child motivated to get to school.”

Leonard says her office handles around 40 to 50 truancy cases a month.

“They didn’t just become truant, they’ve been truant,” she said. “There are factors that should have been addressed years ago.”

Some of that is a result of systemic failures, she said, which sometimes can be traced to the bus stop. Families without transportation can wind up in truancy court because they lack bus route information, bus drivers skip their address or they struggle to wake up early enough for pickup.

“5:30 a.m. at a bus stop for a kid that's already at risk for truancy, that's not how you fix truancy,” Leonard said.

Enrollment paperwork also presents hurdles to families with unstable living situations, especially for those who change schools. Parents who can't provide bills or leases in their names are often turned away, she said, even though federal law requires schools to initially accept students without proof of residence.

As a result, children either remain technically enrolled in their old school district and are marked truant, or their parents remove them from the system entirely, Leonard said.

Smith, the attendance director for East Baton Rouge Parish, noted that many students enter the system already carrying accumulated absences. She said the district is exploring later school start times and has started tracking down families after just three unexcused absences, among other efforts. Still, she said, resource-strapped schools can only do so much.Ěý

“We see gains, but at what level do we expect to see them?” she said. “Some parents have just given up. It's not because of anything the school has done, it's just life.”

A joint responsibility

Grover, elected juvenile judge in 2019, says better communication is needed among judicial, educational and law enforcement agencies. She said they now meet monthly.

“Money is not the answer.” she said. “It's getting the synergy to make sure we’re all working in concert.”

The court created a truancy docket, dedicating two days each month to about 60 truancy cases. It brings families, schools and the legal system together to develop attendance plans, giving families three months to comply before a trial is set.

Between 2020 and 2021, 39% of students with cases on the docketĚýwound up back in school. ButĚýGrover said she is cautious about declaring a trend.

“It’s successful, but it’s not going to fix our overall attendance issues,” she said.

New efforts are being made statewide. The ¶¶Ňőh Board of Elementary and Secondary Education and the ¶¶Ňőh Supreme Court are convening a truancy summit this year. And state lawmakers are considering a bill to tie public school funding to average daily attendance rather than enrollment numbers — a carrot-and-stick approach to administrators.

But those dealing with truancy say a broader, collective commitmentĚý— from parents to businesses and religious organizations — is needed.

“There should be billboards and messaging all over this city about attendance,” Smith said. “It should be in the malls, the schools, the parks.”

“It cannot be addressed solely through systems … this has to be a community effort,” Grover added. “If parents aren’t doing it, that doesn’t mean that we as a society should just sit back and when things go wrong complain about it.”