Under Washington law, school attendance is mandatory up until age 16. This is part of a package of laws called the “Becca laws” named after a 13-year-old girl who dropped out of school, ran away from home and was murdered by a sex offender in Spokane in the mid-1990s. The Legislature knew, as we know now, that dropping out of school puts young people at an extreme risk of being crime victims and criminal offenders.

In fact, young people who drop out of high school are five times more likely to go to prison than their classmates who earn a high school diploma. People who attend some amount of college are five times less likely to go to prison than those with a high school education. Every layer of education is like a protective blanket that protects the potential of that young person and protects our community.

Washington’s truancy law says that any child who misses seven days of school in a month, or 10 in a quarter, is officially “truant.” Although school districts are required to file a truancy petition at this point, they are also required to take steps to reengage students in school. My office works with school districts throughout King County to host workshops designed to understand why the student is missing school. At the end of the workshop, the school, the student and the parents or guardian sign an agreement designed to reengage the student with an educational track.

The law is a court-based scheme, but I am more interested in having the youth attend school than attend court. Only if a student continues to fail to attend school after a workshop agreement is signed, do we take the next step and pursue a petition with the juvenile court. Fewer than 10 percent of the 1,200 petitions filed last school year ended up in court, where students and their parents faced additional court-based consequences.

Here in the Bellevue School District, the leadership has committed to continued funding for a 2-Tier intervention program which includes a community truancy board. The 2-Tier program was started with grant funds from MacArthur Foundation’s Models for Change, but the district has continued to fund the program even after the grant was completed.

We know that truancy is a red flag that leads to dropping out of school, and increases the chance for risky behaviors, substance abuse, and involvement in the criminal justice system. School districts, teachers, and your prosecuting attorney are working hard to keep students from dropping out of school. It is in the best interest of the child and the community.

Original story: http://www.bellevuereporter.com/opinion/234277011.html

The post Op-Ed: Keeping kids in school is the best crime prevention policy appeared first on Re-Elect Dan Satterberg.

“Being a dropout in the 21st century is not a good idea,” said King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg.

Satterberg says many of them started their troubled legal lives in truancy court.

But a new court ruling says if you’re going to take kids to truancy court, you must provide them with a public defender. The prosecutor doesn’t like that idea.

“The county can’t afford to give them lawyers at every step of the way and I think giving a truant a lawyer to fight for their right to not be in school is a ridiculous waste of money,” said Satterberg.

So the prosecutor is changing course. Instead of court, he’s directing kids to new community truancy workshops.

It’s more cost-effective, and with the help of inspirational speakers and counselors, Satterberg hopes it will be more beneficial for the kids.

“We’re going to try to get to the root of the problem why these kids aren’t going to school and try to help them at that point,” he said.

The prosecutor is hoping budget constraints will end up being the mother of invention, keeping more kids on course and out of court.

“We don’t want to give up on these kids.  They’re truant now and truancy is a huge red flag.  We can’t ignore that red flag,” said Satterberg.

Satterberg says students who choose not to attend truancy workshops will still run the risk of being called to court

Original story: http://www.king5.com/news/local/Prosecutor-launching-program-to-keep-kids-in-school-72589932.html

The post KING 5: Prosecutor launching program to keep kids in school appeared first on Re-Elect Dan Satterberg.

There. I admit it. When I was a kid I hated to go to school. I learned as early as my  kindergarten year at North City Elementary how to get out of going to class. The child of divorced parents, I was a latch-key kid who was responsible even at the age of 5 to get to school on my own and decided I’d rather stay home and watch J.P. Patches. My brush with truancy ended when my mother attended a parent/teacher conference and found out I had missed more than 45 days of instruction. She and the principal, Mr. Honeycutt, took a get tough approach and required me to make an appearance at his office every day to prove I was in school. I was forever changed.

Clearly that was a different era. My mother admits that leaving a 5-year old home alone – even in the 1960s – wasn’t a good idea. Then, though, there was no state law against it – or against truancy. Now, Washington State law says that a student is truant if they miss more than seven days of schooling in any one month or ten days in a semester. Kids and their parents face contempt of court charges if they don’t get to class.  Parents can be also be fined up to $25 for each day their child misses and truants can be placed in detention for up to two weeks.

But that’s the least of their worries. When students start missing class on a regular basis it is, understandably, hard for them to catch up on their classwork. Once behind, those students are more likely to drop out of school entirely. Statistics show that three-quarters of all state prison inmates are high school dropouts. A Seattle School District study identifies more than 14-percent of its high school students as truant, this in a school district that has an on-time graduation rate of only 63-percent.

In an effort to curb those statistics, the King County Prosecutor’s office is partnering with the Center for Children and Youth Justice to find new ways to convince kids to stay in school. Instead of requiring kids and parents to go to court, they’ll get a letter indicating that they need to attend a truancy workshop.  “For many of these kids, and their parents, the truancy letter they get from my office will be a wake-up call,” said Prosecuting Attorney Dan Satterberg in his weekly Prosecutor’s Post. “I don’t want to haul them into Juvenile Court, but I do want to get their attention.”

Hmm. A letter. I’m not sure that would get my attention over someone knocking on the door saying I needed to take time off work to go before a judge and explain why my child wasn’t attending school.  The fact is, truancy cases make up thirty percent of all cases filed in Juvenile Court. Truancy cases are creating a backlog in the Juvenile Court system. A report compiled by the Washington State Institute for Public Policy released just last month indicates it cost the state’s courts more than $15-million dollars last year to prosecute truancy cases.

Under Satterberg’s new plan the cases would be diverted from court and into community and school-based truancy workshops aimed at identifying the underlying issues that are keeping the child out of school.  Research shows the biggest reasons behind truancy can be traced to the home, among them a lack of supervision, failure to encourage academic achievement and physical or emotional abuse. If these are indeed the causes, wouldn’t we want to send a stronger signal of the importance of education to both parents and children than a letter?

Original story: http://www.king5.com/ztest/blogger-king/Prosecutor-to-get-tough-on-truancy-69891122.html

The post KING 5: A new approach to truancy appeared first on Re-Elect Dan Satterberg.