Truancy

The Dom Post reports:

The Government has vowed to crack down on truancy as a nationwide survey shows more than 30,000 children a day cut class.

The survey, which will be made public today, also reveals a “lost tribe” of about 2500 long-term truants who are not enrolled in school.

And sadly are bound to feature in future crime stats.

Education Minister Anne Tolley said the survey results were “absolutely outrageous”.

More manpower would be used to find the “lost tribe” including searching known hangouts such as shopping malls and visiting homes.

The Government is offering financial help to schools wanting to prosecute the “worst” parents that have not enrolled their children at primary and secondary schools.

Prosecution guidelines will be published this year, outlining how schools can apply for funding to help them to take a prosecution against parents.

Schools will get up to $1000 to pay for travel costs, for a school’s attendance officer to prepare court documents and lawyer’s fees.”We cannot sit back and do nothing. These figures are really shocking and we need to get serious about tackling this problem,” Mrs Tolley said.

“If these kids are not at school then they are not learning and that is unacceptable. Now we know what sort of numbers we are dealing with I expect the number of truant children to start decreasing as we roll out initiatives.”

The Government has doubled truancy funding to $32 million, which will be spent during the next four years.

One spending increase I am in favour of, as it will pay for itself if these kids do become illiterate criminals.

Schools will be told to introduce an automated computer system which sends text messages or email alerts to parents asking them to explain why their child is not at school.

Parents can reply to the messages to confirm if their children are legitimately away from class, or if they are just skiving off.

The scheme has made huge inroads at Wainuiomata High School, which introduced the system in May. Before it was introduced, there were about 90 unexplained absences each day at the 950-pupil high school. A month later it was sending about 50 text messages a day, which cost 17 cents each.

Automated texts and e-mails is a great idea.