THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, May 8, 1996 TAG: 9605080005
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A18 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Medium: 53 lines
Truancy among the children of welfare recipients is a problem that has confounded educators and social workers for decades.
It is part of a stubborn, self-defeating cycle: Uneducated parents don't ensure their children attend school, so the children become chronic truants who either drop out or are so poorly educated that they, too, are condemned to life on the dole.
Welfare reform aimed at ending truancy has been unsuccessful, prohibitively expensive, or both.
Staff writer Matthew Bowers reported this week on ``Learnfare,'' the Allen administration's initiative to tie truancy to welfare payments. The program has been in effect since January. Early indications are that Learnfare is like many simple solutions to complex problems: It sounds great - a guaranteed vote-getter at election time - but ultimately affects very few.
Under Learnfare, any child from a welfare family who has more than 10 unexcused school absences in a single month could have her Aid to Families with Dependent Children cut off.
Sounds terrific. It's hard for most of us to believe any child is missing more than 10 school days a month.
And they aren't. Of Virginia's 70,000 welfare families, only 85 were contacted during the first three months of the year because they had a child missing more than half of the school days. Thirteen of those children had mitigating circumstances, and the families did not lose their welfare benefits.
Yet imagine the amount of work it took to track the children in these families - work for the schools and for welfare workers. Computer programs had to be established and coordinated. Some localities checked the children and their school-attendance records by hand.
All to nab 72 truants.
Norfolk is about to bid farewell to a seemingly more effective - but more expensive - truancy program. Truancy Action Program was part of a statewide experiment to have case workers knocking at the doors of truants and counseling their families about the importance of education. For students who mended their school-skipping ways, there was a $30 bonus in their parent's monthly welfare check.
The philosophy behind paying children to go to school was flawed to begin with.
But funding for this labor-intensive program has also dried up. It was not feasible on a large-scale anyway. Sad to say, Learnfare promises to have even fewer cost benefits. Truancy remains an unsolved problem. by CNB