LR Opens Center For Truancy

Youths caught on the street skipping school will now be ferried to one by an officer.

The Little Rock School District opened a districtwide “truancy center” in the old Garland Elementary School at 3615 W. 25th St. on Wednesday as a central station to house youths caught skipping school. They will eventually be transported back to their designated schools by district staff members.

Any junior-high or highschool student with more than seven unexcused absence is ruled a truant. Dennis Burrow, head of the school district’s truancy board, said the district has seen more than 800 such cases per semester over the past two semesters.

The new facility is part of a larger district effort to curb truancy, and, as a corollary, the crime that can result from it. Its staff of five, including a truancy interventionist and truancy monitor, will now have a central location to work with at-risk children.

“We agree and the numbers show that idle minds [are] the devil’s workshop,” Burrow said. “If the kids are on the street, they’re going to get into trouble, so we’d like to get them back into school as opposed to back on the street.”

The facility, which will be manned by an additional Little Rock police officer along with its school resource officer, and will be open from 8:30 a.m. to noon during the weekdays.

Even if a student hasn’t accrued the seven unexcused absences, in the eyes of the law he is a truantand in violation of the city’s curfew statute, which says minors cannot be out and about during school hours, as well as late evening and early morning hours.

Little Rock Police Department spokesman Sgt. Cassandra Davis said that minors breaking curfew, either at day or night, can lead to problems.

“We do [curfew/truancy arrests] for every school to keep juveniles out of criminal activity they may come into,” Davis said. “We’ve always tried to address the need for youths to be in school.”

Although arrest rates fluctuated slightly over the time period between 1996 and 2010, roughly one out of every 10 arrests made by police were juveniles, but only a few of those were for curfew violations. Of the 15,767 arrests of those under the age of 18, only 2.5 percent, or 393, werearrests for violating curfew.

And those rates are not consistent. In 1996, police made 76 arrests for curfew violations, compared with just 18 in 1998.

In 2003, those numbers rose to 59 and then to 62 in 2004 but dropped to 7 in 2005.

When asked if the department’s curfew arrest inconsistency, and its newest rise, is a part of a greater push to deter juvenile crime, Davis said it was policing as usual.

“We’ve always worked truancy ... curfews,” Davis said. “[The numbers are] not an ebb and flow of a priority. If we see there is a problem in an area, say at a particular park, we’ll address them.”

Added Davis: “If the call load prevents them from contacting youth and returningthem to [school or parents], they’re just not able to do it.”

Over the past three years, curfew arrests appear to have skyrocketed, going from 15 in 2010 to 106 such arrests in 2011, according to department records.

Last year, there were 152 arrests, according to department data.

But those figures from 2011 and 2012 counted crimes differently from the past, when, for example, the arrest of a teen picked up for a curfew violation, and found to have a weapon, would only count for the weapon charge and the subsequent curfew violation was not counted.

Since 2011, the department counts lesser charges in its arrest in its internal data.

But arrests aren’t enough, according to Sgt. Willie Davis, the coordinator of the department’s Our Kids Program, which works with youths in the city with weekly seminars and other activities and rewards good citizenry and excellence in the classroom with group trips.

Davis, who has headed the program for the past five years, said stopping a child who is out late breaking curfew or wandering down the block when he’s supposed to be in school is only the first step.

“If a kid skipping school is truant, we want to find out what the problem is [so] we can start trying to determine a solution we can build around that kid,” Davis said. “You may see a kid skipping school and I may see a kid who has a problem with a teacher ... or is getting bullied, maybe a counselor isn’t showing him any love or maybe he is intimidated, he feels dumb.”

Davis said curfew violations can lead down a deviant road and it’s incumbent onthe community to intervene and engage teens about their behavior.

But for those children missing school, it’s not enough to tell them to stop.

“We want to ask, ‘Why is your education not important to you?’” Davis said.

Mark Leverett is not afraid to ask.

The children who appear before his bench in the city’s environmental court for violating curfew are subject to an array of inquiries about school, hobbies, their goals in life.

Leverett said that most of those arrested are black and that many of them come from single-parent homes. As judge, he tries to make deals in the form of court orders: Stay out of trouble, show him your grades improve, and he’s pretty easy to work with.

“By and large, the higher in education you go, the less likely you’ll be involved in a criminal act,” Leverett said. “I try to impart a sense of vision for themselves. Some of these kids can’t look past the 10th grade. If you don’t have any hope or vision, what difference does it make if you’re breaking into someone’s house?”

Leverett said the number of children appearing before him for violations has been steadily rising over the past few years.

“I don’t know if [truancy/ curfews] were taken very seriously in times past. I think officers were thinking it was more of a headache. They’d warn the kid, then take him back home,” Leverett said. “Once I got a chance to address [the Police Department], show them what we were doing, that it was unique, I think the officers got motivated. They knew if we get them in court, we’re going to do our absolute bestto help.”

Any rise or fall in the number of children arrested for truancy or curfews is more an effect of high-profile crimes than anything else, according to community activist and former city Board of Directors candidate Robert Webb.

He thinks tragic deaths such as those of Decree Thomas, a 14-year-old gunned down outside a Booker Street house early one morning in July 2011, or the slaying of 14-year-old Michael Stanley during the middle of a school day last May, get everyone’s attention.

Then that attention fades.

“Whenever a kid is killed, they go through it, their senses are heightened about the issue,” Webb said. “They say, ‘Let’s make sure we get these kids off the streets’ ... Then after a few months, things die down, and no one cares.”

Webb credited the city in its efforts to work with Davis’ OK Program, New Futures, and other intervention programs in the city, but he thinks they need to expand.

The new truancy center is a sign that the schools and the city both miss the point, Webb said.

“[Truancy] is symptomatic at best,” Webb said. “The city always wants to beat the hell out of the symptom, beat it to the ground, but they never stop to ask why are these kids not going to school.”

Poverty, performance issues or an overall indifference pervade at-risk youths, Webb said.

“Sad thing is, school isn’t for everybody. But when I was growing up, if you didn’t finish school, you could still go out and get a job,” Webb said. “What’s unfortunate now in Little Rock, we don’t have that mechanism. [At risk teens] do get a job; unfortunately, it’s not always a legal one.”