CHARLESTON —
The names and faces may change, Circuit Judge Alan Moats said Monday, but the parents summoned to his courtroom to explain their children’s truancy offer the same, weak excuses.
“Some of them will actually come down and say, ‘I just didn’t get them up. I didn’t get up out of bed.’ I hear that so often,” Moats told the House-Senate education subcommittee. “The parent just says, ‘I didn’t get up. I don’t work, but I didn’t get up. I stay up late watching TV. I just don’t get up out of bed.’”
The parents also frequently allege that they sent in a written excuse to explain an absence, but their child failed to deliver it.
“The child will say, ‘No, you didn’t,’” Moats recounted to lawmakers.
Moats’ circuit covers Barbour and Taylor counties, which he said saw half of their students miss at least 10 days during the 2009-10 school year. He offered his courtroom experiences as part of an effort by Supreme Court Justice Robin Davis, who also spoke at Monday’s interim meeting, to tackle truancy in West Virginia.
More than one-third of West Virginia students, or 108,000 children, had at least five unexcused absences during the last school year, according to figures provided Monday by the state Department of Education. Of those students, 48,768 had 10 or more such absences.
Moats said such students become more at risk of dropping out as they fall further behind in class, potentially slowing progress for other students whenever teachers try to help them catch up. He said 34,547 students dropped out of West Virginia schools during the opening decade of this century. Without the skills to find jobs in the modern economy, dropouts pose a huge threat to West Virginia’s future, Moats argued.
“This is destroying our state slowly but surely, but certainly,” he told lawmakers.
Moats said three-fourths of the nation’s prison inmates are high school dropouts, citing figures from the Mattie C. Stewart Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to reducing the dropout rate. The judge also said that drug abuse plays a major role in this overall crisis, with dropouts turning to crime to support their addictions. That part of the problem is not limited to older youth and young adults, he said.
“It is a problem when as judge I have to send a sixth-grader to drug rehab,” Moats said. “It’s frightening when parents are begging me, ‘Please help my child. We don’t know how to deal with this.’”
Nine out of 10 of Barbour County’s dropouts during the 2011-12 budget year had at least one parent who had also dropped out, said the judge, crediting that county’s attendance director.
“I’m willing to bet that’s probably pretty typical around the state,” Moats told the subcommittee. “So it is multi-generational, and it’s not changing.”
The judge said these parents become bitter about school, and that influences their children.
“I hear that all the time, the animosity toward the school system,” Moats said. He added later, “Once somebody drops out, then they do blame, they blame all of us because nobody saved them. So now their child has fallen into the same trap, and they don’t know how to get them out.”
But despite that attitude, these parents also seem to understand the value of an education. A number of them have broken down and cried when asked how they’ve fared as dropouts, Moats said.
“They say, ‘It’s been very difficult to make a living, it’s a day-to-day struggle, and I want better for my children,’” he told lawmakers. “So I say, ‘Well, then, why, why don’t you get them to school?’”
Some parents also try to yank their children from school when confronted about truancy, saying they will home-school them instead. But Moats cited the West Virginia Constitution’s mandate for “a thorough and efficient system of free schools.”
“Nobody, not even a parent, has the right to deny a child of that constitutional right,” he said.
West Virginia
Truancy is major threat to W.Va.
Judge: This is destroying our state slowly but surely
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