School truancy crisis means more than missed classes

Sixteen years ago, while driving south on Route 167, Terrell Dorsey had a moment. He was a middle-aged father of four, crying in his car on the way to work.

The job selling electronics wasn’t terrible. But earning minimum wage at 52 years old was not the life Dorsey had imagined. He’d attended good schools in Portland and, as a youngster, excelled.

Dorsey, however, was not a big kid, and in high school he got bullied. In response, he began skipping classes and eventually dropped out, gravitating toward street life, which ended with a brief stint in prison for dealing drugs.

Six years after Dorsey’s release came his epiphany on Route 167. He was ashamed of squandering his school years and determined to prevent a new generation of kids from doing the same.

“It was humiliating, the daily indignity of not having an education,” he said. “It hits you like a hard slap in the face.”

Dorsey told me this story sitting on a bench outside Auburn High School, where he now spends part of each week nudging kids to go to class via a combination of motivational talk and incentives — i.e., snacks and gift cards for good attendance. He also holds workshops for families in a half-dozen other school districts as founder of the truancy prevention program Unleash the Brilliance.

Worries over absenteeism sound almost quaint in an era of casual gun violence. And there will be readers of this column who wonder why kids should get $25 gift cards just for showing up at school like they’re supposed to.

But these small enticements, including opportunities to earn extra cash through community projects, are just a hook, a way to attract students so that Dorsey and his assistant Carrie Cheetham can begin building relationships with students — and relationships do more to bring kids back than punishment or threats.

Whatever works, says Auburn’s principal, Jeff Gardner, because truancy has become a full-fledged emergency.

Last year, nearly 40% of the kids in Seattle’s high-poverty middle schools were chronically absent, meaning they missed at least 18 days in 2022-23 — the equivalent of three weeks of classes.

This is not a problem particular to the Seattle area. Last summer, a Stanford University professor crunched the numbers and found that 33% of students in Washington were chronically absent in 2021-22, the 10^th highest rate in the country. The U. S. Department of Education calls absenteeism a national crisis.

If the long-term risk was merely a generation of young people leaving school ignorant of basic skills and knowledge, that would be alarming enough.

But chronic absenteeism almost always points toward more basic dangers, like family chaos, homelessness and the possibility of abuse, neglect, or even trafficking. In short, truancy is a huge, crackling red flag.

For instance, virtually every juvenile who has faced criminal charges in King County since 2020 was truant from school, according to the prosecutor’s office, including the two 16-year-olds found shot to death by the side of I-5 last month.

“If a kid can just be in school, a lot of other things start to fall into place,” says Senior Deputy Prosecutor Jamie Kvistad. “Before COVID, we didn’t realize how critical school is, what a role it plays.”

Though the correlation between truancy and crime may be obvious, schools are often overlooked as places to focus upstream anti-crime efforts. Last winter, Kvistad doubled down, contacting educators in 19 King County districts and charter schools to improve communication about truant kids.

The trouble is, truancy petitions, intended to catch students before they get into serious trouble, have a lot of baggage because, technically, they criminalize kids who hadn’t actually committed a crime. And because their sanctions — $25 a day for each unexcused absence — are hardly helpful to families already struggling.

In King County, that punitive approach is long gone. The point of petitions nowadays is to connect kids with services.

Back at Auburn High School, Dorsey and Cheetham scroll through student data to zero in on those who are failing multiple classes or constantly tardy. Yet not one of the kids they summon for a chat in their conference-room-turned-office seems to mind being there. All of them are smiling, eager to talk. Cheetham dispenses granola bars and advice — how to deal with a difficult teacher or make up late assignments — acting as part guidance counselor, part cheerleader.

Initially, Unleash the Brilliance worked wonders, particularly with students of color. When Dorsey started at Auburn High in 2018, 44% of students had poor attendance. A year later, that number was halved, according to data from the state education department.

But then came the pandemic. While the spiking absenteeism rates at Auburn are slowly going down, they are nowhere near as low as before COVID-19 shuttered schools. Dorsey says he made about 300 home visits during those years, trying to reengage kids.

Seattle Public Schools has been less aggressive. Just over half of the students at Chief Sealth and Rainier Beach high schools showed up regularly last year, yet the district filed truancy petitions on only 22 kids across the city, about 1% of all the 1,577 petitions filed in King County.

State law says schools are supposed to file before a student’s 15^th unexcused absence. But Melody Edmiston, one of two staffers at King County Court who handles these cases, says often kids have been truant 80 or 90 or even 100 days before any paperwork lands on her desk.

Those who were in middle school during the pandemic are in the most trouble. Between their schools’ closure and the chronic absenteeism since, Edmiston is seeing children who have barely been inside a classroom for three years. There are others, she knows, who have been out longer than that.

No wonder test scores are sagging.

But this is a solvable problem. With Kvistad forging better connections to schools, Edmiston contacting families and Dorsey talking to kids, we have the outlines of a solution.

Slowly, student by student, it may be working. A 10th grader at Auburn High, who told me she failed most of her classes in middle school, is now a regular in Dorsey’s room. She’s thinking about going to college. She says she might want to be a child psychologist someday.