WHY SO MANY PHILLY STUDENTS SKIP SCHOOL

Students are often blamed for truancy. But in Philly, it’s emblematic of the city’s poverty and the disintegration of resources for its people.

Last year, the School District of Philadelphia identified thousands of students as “chronically absent,” meaning they missed more than 10% of school days.

Zyara Evans, 16, was one of them.

When she was younger, Evans enjoyed going to school. “I love writing,” she said, explaining that English was her favorite subject. She wanted to be the first person in her family to graduate from high school. “Homework. That was my peace.”

But as she grew older, that changed. Her personal and family life slipped into turmoil, and school no longer felt like a refuge. For nearly two years, Evans was out of school.

“I was running away from my problems,” she said.

According to a previous analysis of School District data by The Inquirer, nearly half of all district students were chronically absent in the 2021-22 school year, a 93% increase from 2018-19. At a school board meeting last spring, Superintendent Tony B. Watlington Sr. called absenteeism a “life-and-death” issue.

And although there is widespread acknowledgment that truancy, or absenteeism without an excuse, is a critical problem, its causes are rarely understood. Truancy is frequently blamed on individual students and their apathy for school, their rebelliousness, or the inability to resist the temptation of life on the streets.

But, particularly in Philadelphia, truancy more often is emblematic of the city’s poverty and the disintegration of resources for its people.

“It’s never that they don’t want to go to school just because,” said Amber Fullwood, interim truancy program manager for Congreso de Latinos Unidos Inc. “It’s always rooted in something.”

Months in hiding

When Evans was 8 years old, her family life took a devastating turn. Her older sister was removed from her family by the Department of Human Services (DHS).

“That’s my sister, you’re supposed to stay with me,” she said.

After her sister was taken away, the stability of Evans’ life was shaken. She felt angry, but hardly talked to anyone in her life about the emotions swirling inside her.

A month after Evans enrolled at the U School in North Philly for ninth grade, another girl started spreading rumors about her. After Evans confronted her face-to-face, she was suspended from school because the girl felt threatened.

It ignited her. Evans figured that she would give the school a real reason to dole out its discipline. Minutes after learning she was being suspended, Evans waited for the girl outside the lunchroom and beat her up.

She was then expelled and sent to Camelot Academy, one of the school district’s disciplinary institutions. Evans left Camelot after just a couple of weeks, deciding it wasn’t for her. For the next few months, she and a friend skipped school entirely.

Evans and her friend were living in a house with several other people she didn’t know well. Then, the cops showed up. Evans was arrested on burglary and conspiracy charges for being in the home.

But shortly thereafter, while she was in DHS’s care, she escaped.

Evans spent the next eight months hiding, living with a different friend who was also truant.

“She never went to school [either], so we’d just go stay in the house all day, watch TV,” she said, describing how they would also meet up with other kids who weren’t in school.

Her friend’s mother knew about Evans’ situation and that her own daughter wasn’t going to school. But she still allowed Evans to stay while she went off to work. She thought Evans was a good influence on her daughter.

The draw of the outside world

For some students, life at school is defined by danger and disorder, and the sense that most adults there don’t actually care about them. Getting away can feel more peaceful, or the outside world offers a more relevant, interesting experience.

Machi Rawls, 17, decided to attend Murrell Dobbins Career and Technical Education High School, despite his mother’s concerns about going to a large public high school. He had spent his childhood in Catholic and charter schools, two years of which were remote because of the pandemic.

At first, all went well. “I was on my P’s & Q’s,” Rawls said. But halfway through his freshman year, things changed.

“Around the fifth or sixth month, I stopped going to classes. I would leave school early,” he said. Although Rawls was technically counted as present in the mornings, his days became a blur of playing basketball at Cecil B. Moore Recreation Center, spending time with girls and watching them fight, and hanging out with friends at their homes.

The drama outside class was more compelling than the instruction. And as his academic engagement plummeted, so, too, did his grades. Rawls was surprised when he learned that he would have to repeat ninth grade.

“I wasn’t thinking about that. I don’t know, I [was] so caught up in the thrill of whatever I’m doing,” he said.

Students in chaotic schools face a long string of substitutes, teachers who aren’t teaching, violence and bullying, or overcrowded classrooms. They often believe that there is nothing to show up for, and walk away

Rawls admits that he found Dobbins, which has eight floors and more than 1,000 students, large and chaotic, and he experienced little connection to his instructors or the subject matter.

He recalls how in his first few weeks there, a teacher approached him, noticing his size, and tried to persuade him to join the football team. But the teacher didn’t bother to ask Rawls his name or whether he was even interested in football.

“At least act like you care, you know?” he said.

Instead, what drew his attention were his peers and the fights that would break out almost daily, often outside of school; they were can’t-miss events.

When absence is criminalized

School attendance is compulsory, and truancy is a crime that can be charged to a student and a legal guardian.

Once a student reaches six unexcused absences, a cascading series of consequences begins that could ultimately involve community-based agencies, DHS, and Family Court.

The flow of cases is often convoluted and hard for students and their families to understand. After a student has accrued more than 10 days of unexcused absences, the case is referred to Philadelphia Regional Truancy Court, a collaboration of the School District, Family Court, and the city that is intended to decrease the escalating numbers of truancy cases handled by Family Court judges. But for such an official-sounding institution, there is an enormous cloud of mystery around it:

• There is no website or phone number for truancy court. The closest is contact information for the School District’s Office of Attendance and Truancy, which can be reached at attendanceandtruancy@philasd.org or 215-400-4830 (option 1).

• Hearings are conducted in converted school district buildings on a schedule that changes month to month.

• The judges overseeing truancy court are actually not judges, but lawyers who serve as hearing officers. They have the ability to levy fines, sentence students older than 15 to community service, or jail parents, but they rarely do.

It is obvious to those working within this system that it is riddled with flaws.

“To be honest, truancy court is cupcake. There’s no reinforcement or accountability from the court process [on] our parents,” said Brandon Kinsey, a supervisor with HopePHL’s Truancy Intervention and Prevention Services (TIPS) program. “On the TCO [or] truancy court order, it can say, ‘subject to fines’ or ‘possible [removal] of child’ but they’re not fining our parents. There’s no reinforcement for our parents.”

Even so, it remains incredibly important. In a typical hearing, the judge reviews a student’s record of absences and decides whether the student has to return to court. A truant student who meets with the court consistently, submits notes for previous unexcused absences, and demonstrates improved attendance can be discharged and avoid having the case referred to Family Court and the invasive DHS system.

Because truancy court doesn’t address the underlying reasons for a child’s absences, the problems causing truancy remain unresolved.

“Somebody needs to take a look at how we’re dealing with our families because we’re not doing it right,” said Keisha Brunson, HopePHL’s TIPS program manager. “The actual court process is not effective.”

Attending school without a home

Housing insecurity is the number one driver of truancy. “There is no money in the city [for housing help] right now. Imagine caring for children and facing eviction,” Congreso de Latinos Unidos’ Fullwood said.

Housing insecurity is why Erica Tompkins’ two children started missing school frequently last year.

“It came from bouncing and not having a stable place and not really having a place for kids,” she explained. “I was homeless for a while.”

Tompkins worried about such things as her kids having clean clothes because it is hard to do laundry and being bullied by others.

“There were calls. The school sent a letter. They sent me over to [truancy] court. It was a lot. I didn’t have financial support. I didn’t have moral support. I was dealing with lots of issues.”

Tompkins said her two children — high school sophomore Sincer Stewart and sixth grader Kodie Rawls (unrelated to Machi Rawls) — each missed half a year of school.

‘They just want us to put a Band-Aid on it’

DHS contracts with 12 nonprofits to provide truancy services in 94 public schools across the city, including all 20 community schools. These case managers have heard almost every reason a child doesn’t come to school.

For example, some students become enmeshed in their parents’ domestic problems.

• Joseph Durham, 14, said it was “household problems” and conflict with his mother that led to his truancy.

• “I was getting blamed for everything [at home],” he said.

• Durham wanted to escape, driving him away from home and school to spend time with his friends, and eventually committing a crime.

• Now, after getting charged with auto theft and robbery, he no longer lives with his mother but with a friend who is also his co-defendant, and that person’s grandmother. “I just go day by day,” he said.

Case managers from across the city expressed frustration that they can’t address the fundamental causes of truancy in students’ lives, even when they can help them with such things as rent assistance or school uniforms.

“I can’t fix a family’s financial situation [from] one court date to the next court date. It’s probably going to continue. I can’t fix their housing issue right away,” said McKenzie Richardson, a supervisor with HopePHL’s TIPS.

“I can’t get them into another school [just] like that. Sometimes it’s just hard for the families.”

“The root [cause] of truancy is generational poverty for families that are caught in it,” said Thoai Nguyen, CEO of the Southeast Asian Mutual Assistance Association Coalition (SEAMAAC), which provides truancy case management services in South Philly.

“I’ve visited homes where I open up a pantry and there’s no food in there. Can you imagine sending your child to school in the morning?”

Nguyen has been working on truancy cases with SEAMAAC for 18 years, and is frustrated with what he perceives to be the city and the school district’s attitudes toward truancy — as long as a family stays out of the DHS system, it’s a win.

But Nguyen said that truancy prevention work does nothing to address why the student is truant in the first place.

“There’s housing insecurities, there are issues of safety, there’s issues of addiction, but nobody wants us to talk about it. They just want us to put a Band-Aid on it and move to the next family.”

And even if it’s not a win, getting a student back into school before the courts are involved is still a reason to exhale, some say.

“When you get sent to family court, now you got DHS in your business. Now they’re going to be looking for everything,” said Kinsey, who is also a former DHS employee.

He believes the work of a truancy case manager is about doing as much as possible to keep students from getting to this point.

“Our job is prevention. How can we prevent these families from going into the child welfare system?”

Getting back on track

• Failing his freshman year was a wake-up call for Machi Rawls. But so, too, was the incident that got him arrested the summer after school let out — he spent a year at the Juvenile Justice Center.

• He doesn’t want to discuss the details, but says he’s learned from the experience. “You don’t make friends in jail,” he said.

• His focus is now on finishing school, a focus he wished he had three years ago. He attends the Philadelphia Learning Academy North (PLAN), an alternative high school, and is on track to graduate this coming February.

• Durham, a freshman at Martin Luther King High School, still finds little to interest him academically, and doesn’t currently participate in any extracurricular activities.

• But he loves to read, and said he wants to graduate. “I am going to school [just to] get it over with,” he said. “School is six hours of wasting your time.”

Evans’ promise

After several months, Zyara Evans had a falling-out with the girl she was living with and decided it was time. She called her mother and told her that she was going to turn herself in.

“You want to do that? That’s the right thing to do,” Evans remembered her mother saying.

Evans was put under house arrest, and used her time at home to get closer with her mother and siblings. She took charge of things around the house, cleaning and making sure her younger brothers and sisters were getting the help they needed.

She’s worried about her siblings falling into the same situations that she once did.

“I’m terrified that they’re going to go through what I went through,” she said. “I’m just trying to show them that’s not the best route to go. … It’s seven of us. We [are] a big family. We gotta keep it that way.”

Evans’ case is now closed, and she expects that her record as a youth offender will eventually be expunged.

She enrolled at Benjamin Franklin High School in the last few weeks of school before summer break, and this fall, she’s back as a 10th grader. No one has higher expectations than she does.

“I will go every day. No off days. I will have perfect attendance. I will try to be valedictorian. I’m going to do anything and everything I can to make my mom proud,” she said.