Truant Recovery Program

The Truant Recovery Program is a collaborative effort between the school district and all community police jurisdictions within its boundaries. The program is preventive rather than punitive. Its primary task is to return truant students to school as soon as possible. The program operates under the authority of the Student Welfare and Attendance (SWAT) Office. The program authorizes the local police jurisdictions to make contact with students on the streets during school hours. Students without a valid excuse slip are taken into temporary custody and transported to the SWAT office for processing. SWAT personnel attempt to contact the youth's parents for an in-person meeting, in which both can be counseled and the parent can return the child to school. If a parent cannot be reached, SWAT personnel return the youth to school. The school site is also contacted, and both the school and SWAT Office closely monitor the student's attendance in the future.

Three additional components of the program provide both accountability and consequences. First, the Department of Probation assigns an officer to the SWAT program to screen all contacted juveniles for probation violations and bench warrants. Second, the Student Attendance Review Board reviews records for habitual truancy cases and refers cases to the juvenile court for review and adjudication. Finally, the Suspension Alternative Class (SAC) is designed to make sure truant students are not rewarded for truancy by missing more school. Instead, students in SAC remain in school but are unable to engage in regular classes.

The goal of this program is to reduce truancy in West Contra Costa schools.

The Truant Recovery Program was evaluated using a quasi-experimental design. The results show an increase in conformity to school regulations after contact with the program and a decrease in the number of disciplinary actions. However, during this same period there was an increase in formal contacts with the justice system and an increase in the proportion of arrests (4 percent of the truants were arrested before autumn 1997, compared with 8 percent after the fall, though this is not a significant increase). The number of both excused and unexcused absences decreased after contact with the program, which was the goal of the program.