Kamala Harris - For California Attorney General 2010

San Francisco D.A. put truants on the most-wanted list

By Tom Chorneau, SI&A Cabinet Report
December 8, 2009

If elected California Attorney General next year, San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris wants to make truancy in the public schools a very big deal.

Harris, a two-term D.A. and a front-runner in the Democratic primary for the state’s top law officer, helped engineer an impressive 23 percent drop in truancy among elementary students in the San Francisco School District in the past year. She’s taking aim now at the older kids and already showing some signs of success.

And, if voters bring her to Sacramento, she has designs on taking the truancy program statewide.

“What we simply did was put the bright, infrared light of public safety and law enforcement on the fact that these children are not in school,” Harris said in an interview with Cabinet Report. “There’s a very direct connection between the elementary school truant and the high school dropout and the victim of crime and the perpetrator of crime.”

Citing a recent study from the University of California, Santa Barbara, she noted the direct cost to state’s juvenile justice system from dropouts is $1.1 billion annually. She said the expense exceeds $20 billion a year when related costs from health care and social services are included – and that doesn’t count the cost to the state’s future workforce and the California economy.

 “It is all of those costs,” she said. “None of which have anything to do solely with caring about a child. It has to do with thinking about how we can be more effective and efficient in a state that is on the verge of bankruptcy.”

The initiative in San Francisco started about four years ago when Harris ordered an analysis of the city’s homicide victims under the age of 25 years old. What she found was that 94 percent of them were high school dropouts.

When she contacted the school district looking for further insight she learned that nearly 10 percent of the student population was considered habitually truant and nearly half of them were from elementary schools.

The first step was simply to write letters to parents on the D.A.’s letterhead warning them that if children were not in school, the adults could be prosecuted. Later she helped set up one of the first Truancy Courts in California where a single judge has jurisdiction over not only the student and the parents but also the government bureaucracy to ensure no one falls through the cracks.

Efforts were also coordinated with the San Francisco schools and Superintendent Carlos Garcia, whom Harris gives much credit in making the program successful.

Keith Choy, coordinator of the district’s Stay in School program, said Harris was instrumental in helping bring together existing city services to confront the problem.

 “We’re really pleased,” he said. “We didn’t think the district by itself could really take on the whole problem. We didn’t have the teams, we didn’t have the social workers and support staff. And with all the budget cuts we couldn’t go out and run in the streets and do the follow up.”

He said there was an epiphany when school officials, the health department and human services all realized they were working on the same kids. “We found that because of privacy laws and other things we wouldn’t normally talk to each other,” he said.

“Kamala’s efforts have really helped us put together a longer term plan,” he explained. “Let’s get to the kids earlier, let’s give the families more support and give us some time to begin working on the older kids.”

Harris has only prosecuted about 20 cases so far but the threat of the courts has been very effective.

What can schools expect if she’s elected AG?

Districts would likely be encouraged if not facilitated to take a closer look at their truancy problems. Better recordkeeping and coordination with social service providers would be a starting point but she said she would mostly use the office’s bully-pulpit to make sure the public understands the connection between truants and public safety.

“As someone who has personally prosecuted murders and career criminals that I care about children issues because I can see who that six-year-old is going to become in about ten years,” she said. “Yes, we have to have a system that reacts after a crime has occurred, but we also have to be effective about preventing crime before it occurs and one of the best indicators is elementary school truancy.”

Source: SI&A Cabinet Report

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