Nearly 20 percent of city elementary school students missed one month of school or more last year, according to the mayor's press release. Most of the local schools with the highest rates of chronic absence are predominantly black or Latino, low-income schools, a 2008 report by the Center for New York City Affairs shows.
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The task-force has been making good faith efforts to avoid designing protocols that would penalize parents and students whose attendance could be improved through non-punitive means, said three experts the city has consulted about its plan.
Some students, especially the middle and high school students, do cut classes and engage in mischief. And some parents are too high on drugs or otherwise incapacitated to ensure that their young children get to school. But some students miss school because they are homeless or have health or transportation problems.
Threatening all these families with unnecessary legal action can do more harm than good, said Mariajose Romero, senior research associate at the National Center for Children in Poverty. "There is a role for the courts, but it has to be the very, very last straw," she said. "It has to be the last resort, when nothing can be done, because it creates tremendous animosity and tremendous mistrust and you cannot educate children in an atmosphere of mistrust."
Feinblatt agrees. Of calling in child welfare or the police, he said: "It's not the first thing you want to do. It's not the second thing you want to do. It's probably not the third or fourth or fifth thing you want to do. At some point when other things have failed you have to look at whether there are ways to engage families and kids when you really feel kids are in danger."
Broadly, there are four types of reforms that school systems can implement to combat chronic absenteeism and truancy, Romero said. They can strengthen their community policing and court system. They can increase student and family support services. They can mobilize the community to address the issue. And they can reorganize and reform the schools themselves.
The experts all recommended that the task force focus on funneling additional services to students and their families via partnerships with community-based organizations. The task force is very receptive to this advice, the experts said. "They're very tuned into the message that we carried and that others have been talking about," said Andrew White, director of the Center for New York City Affairs.
The task force is in part a response to the chronic absenteeism problem identified in by the Center's 2008 report. That report found that in 2007, 123 individual New York City primary schools, at least 30 percent of the children were chronically absent.
White says that whatever policies the mayor's task force endorses, adequate funding is going to be a determinant of success.
"It's going to be a challenge of coordination as well as resources," he says. "When you get down to it, healthcare, transportation, family support, mental health services, youth services, childcare--these things cost money."
City Hall says that since the task force has just begun, there's been no discussion yet about specific programs, let alone funding.
