Off The Bench: The Challenge of Truancy by Steve Rideout

For courts that hear juvenile matters, the cases that are the most difficult are truancy cases. They are not hard because of the facts on whether a child has missed school or not. They are hard because of what judges are then asked to do about the behavior. Without the cooperation of the school system and the service providers in a community working together, the court has limited chances of changing the behavior. Punishing a child is not the answer.

When I first went on the bench, I heard few truancy cases as few were brought by our school system. The cases arrived in court usually in April or May when school would soon be out for the summer. I saw the damage of truancy in the delinquency disposition reports of convicted youth where I learned that he or she had missed too many days at school over several years, often had been passed on administratively to the next grade, and our school system had made ineffective efforts to address the problem.

I learned early on that many teachers and administrators were happy that some children were not in school, as they disrupted their classes. I also learned from one Superintendent that I would have to go to battle with him to make any changes in how “his” schools managed those cases. It took me nine years to be able to collaborate with a new Superintendent who understood how to address the challenges that these children and the school system faced.

Thanks to our Court Service Unit (CSU) and its leader, we were able to successfully address the multiple challenges that brought these children to court. The CSU manages intake and diversion of cases and provides some services including probation and parole. With the new Superintendent, we went from ten cases a year to three hundred cases the next year and four hundred cased the following year. We were told that there could have been even more but that the school system and our CSU did not have the staff to process and manage them all.

Truancy is the outward manifestation of what the student is struggling with in his or her life. We found in our work that about 75% of the cases that came to court involved mental health issues and/or substance abuse issues. Back in the 1990’s the internet and social media were not the kind of issue that they are today, so I suspect that it is more of a contributing factor to what is happening now.

What we found was that services were the answer for many of these children. After the CSU and our city agencies got their programming up and running and coordinated, as was required in Virginia by what was then called the Comprehensive Services Act, we found a reduction in our delinquency caseload of close to 50% and an increase in truancy filings where effective services could be put in place.

The services in Alexandria were coordinated as they were provided by City Government and the city was only fifteen square miles that is dwarfed by the size of the counties on the Eastern Shore. Every child in the city that became involved with the CSU or the court changed from being a school child or court child or mental health child, etc. to being the child of all of the child serving agencies that worked together to find solutions for him or her and the family. 

Collaboration and cooperation amongst the child serving agencies is critical in improving outcomes for children and families. Without them, communities will continue to struggle to address these social challenges and will continue to point fingers at one another for the inability to help improve the lives of children and their families.

For the Masters, Magistrates, and Judges that hear these cases, the best thing that you can do is bring the agencies together for discussions on how to make the system in your community work better. Each community should have similar challenges but often different solutions, as each community has its own strengths and challenges in its systems and the people who lead and work in them.

Among the many positive things that happened in our community as a result of this collaborative work was how agency staff became excited about what they were doing. They were no longer doing this work because it was a job that they needed to support themselves and their family. They were doing it and loving it because they were once again doing the kind of work they felt called to do and were seeing the positive results that they had not seen earlier in their careers.

Looking at each case that you have with what I call “new eyes” can be one place to start. I will leave you with my favorite story from my work where “new eyes” found the solution. 

I had a teenage girl in court on a truancy case. She had missed many classes, and the school system had worked with her for years. At the disposition of the case there was no solution offered for her. I learned at the disposition hearing for the first time that she was the mother of a 6-month-old baby. 

As I knew from my community volunteer work for the Alexandria Tutoring Consortium (www.alexandriatutors.org) that daily reading to young children was critically important in their being ready for school, my disposition for her case was that she had to read to her baby every day for at least 30 minutes.

I also order that she keep a record of the books that she read to her child and return in 90 days to talk with me about how her baby reacted and what books she had read to her. When the young mother was first in court, she was sullen and spoke in one-word sentences. When she returned 90 days later, I could not shut her up. 

From that sullen disposition came a happy and excited young lady who was back in school and loving it. She had come to understand the value of education in a way that connected to her. If you have a teen mom or dad who is not attending school, give that idea a try. Who knows what might happen?

Thanks for reading. Please be in touch.

Judge Rideout is the former Chief Judge of the Alexandria, VA Juvenile and Domestic Relations District Court (1989-2004). From 2004 until the present he has consulted in different states to support their efforts to improve their child welfare systems. From 2016 to early 2021, he was the Ward 1 Commissioner on the Cambridge City Council. Throughout his career, he has been an advocate for improving the lives of children in his and other communities.