Youth Crime is Spiking – So is Truancy!

The twofold increase in truancy and youth crime since the pandemic must be addressed head-on by courageous leaders.

Nov 23, 2023

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My parents did something dangerous for the time. In New York State, in the late 1970’s, truancy laws focused on the parents, not the child. I was in the middle of the fifth grade and my father was in the principal’s office letting him know that I would not be returning to class. I would be traveling the nation and learning via a correspondence course from the Calvert School in Maryland, an established accredited institution. My principal advised caution. He recognized that there would be people who wouldn’t take the time to recognize the nuance in our situation and my parents may argue their case from behind bars.

Truancy, and youth crime, are out of control

The worst example is the City of Philadelphia. According to The Inquirer, nearly half of district students were ‘chronically absent,’ an increase of 93% from 2018-2019. Coast to coast, in both red and blue states, post-pandemic truancy has increased by 50-75%. Nashville has created a truancy court.

“All told, an estimated 6.5 million additional students became chronically absent, according to the data, which was compiled by Stanford University education professor Thomas Dee in partnership with The Associated Press. Absences were more prevalent among Latino, Black and low-income students, according to Dee’s analysis.”

Mainstream media is telling the story all wrong. They’re focusing on individual unique cases, many of whom would be missing school anyway with their lame excuses. Several of their examples have parents who don’t function as parents:

“Everyone seemed less tolerant, more angry. (Rousmery) Negrón's son told her he overheard a teacher mocking his learning disabilities, calling him an ugly name. Her son didn’t want to go to school anymore. And she didn’t feel he was safe there. He would end up missing more than five months of sixth grade.”

When I came home with report cards that described me as prone to distraction, I’m thankful to my family who loved me enough to discipline the ADHD out of me.

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If you think education is expensive, try ignorance!

As a nation we spend $810,000,000,000 annually on K-12 public education. The model varies from state to state but the basic tax breakdown is 45% local taxes, 45% state taxes and 10% federal money. Overall, public education is 12.7% of all public spending.

We pay for that whether or not the students show up for class. You, the taxpayer, pay for an education that the student doesn’t receive.

The scale of this issue cannot be understated. We had a truancy problem before the pandemic. Today we have an additional 6,500,000 chronically absent students nationally.

Parents and students need to held accountable

In the good old days, deputies and officers used to have full time details where they would go out in a van and pick up truants. It wasn’t hard and it was only occasionally dangerous. These cops knew where to look. The kids would think they came out of nowhere, but the officers were like experienced fishing guides, and rescued youth from situations where they would be victimized or exploited. Is Human Trafficking your cause? Truancy is the high-risk behavior that lends itself to force, fraud and coercion.

A convergence of public outcry, trauma informed therapy, and a crisis in police staffing brought social work to be proposed as a viable alternative. There was no shortage of police administrators happy to wash their hands of this task. It’s a perfect risk management solution for law enforcement agencies to lower their overall liability. But like the navy, warships are safe docked but their value of use involves risk and peril. However, the outcome and our current situation could not have turned out worse, for the agencies, for the cities and, most importantly, for the kids.

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Priority: Law Enforcement Focus on Truancy

Chronic absenteeism, truancy, must be addressed immediately. Cities and counties need to prioritize deputies and officers to round up kids on the street when they should be in school. When education is replaced by corruption and exploitation, social workers will not save our kids by writing letter after letter.

When youth aren’t being influenced in school, what ideology is filling the vacuum. To be blunt, they’re not hanging out with the winners. As we’ve seen in cities from coast to coast, brazen robberies, organized shoplifting raids where felony violence on store employees, even arson, is used against anti-theft devices.

Governing Magazine, the government breakroom periodical, tells us that nothing is wrong and to ignore our lying eyes while stores are abandoning downtown cores in significant numbers due to theft losses. We are also seeing unprecedented violence by young people in settings where their presence is not age-appropriate, like 3 a.m. shootouts on crowded streets.

With this much at stake, the future of unschooled youth, and the annual nearly trillion dollar cost paid by taxpayers, we need to deliver for the kids and the police now!

Please keep all officers in your prayers, especially those working this holiday!