High-tech watchdog for truants

By ALAN PERROTT and RUTH BERRY

Parents are to be sent automated emails or text messages telling them when their children are wagging school under new anti-truancy measures.

Education Minister Trevor Mallard announced the initiative in Wellington yesterday as part of an $8.6 million package spread over four years.

Mr Mallard said swift and direct communication with parents would encourage them to provide schools with justifications for why their child was absent.

Schools will be able to begin sending the automatic messages through a project to enhance their software packages.

Other measures include:

* $30,000 in the first year to improve schools' ability to prosecute parents for allowing ongoing truancy or failing to enrol their children in school.

* Reviewing anti-truancy measures in areas with high truancy rates.

* $411,000 to be spent on truancy programmes in the Far North, Kaipara, Opotiki, Papakura, South Waikato, Taupo, Waipa and Whangarei.

* A trial data network to track students through the school system in 2005.

* Expanding the suspensions reduction programme to include schools with high drop-out rates, at a total cost of $2.3 million per year.

* An additional $650,000 to hasten the process for getting non-enrolled students back into school.

The programme follows the release of a Ministry of Education report into attendance and absenteeism.

The report was based on nationwide school attendance figures for a single week in September 2002 that showed an overall truancy rate of 2.9 per cent, about 17,400 per day, although this figure rose to 6 per cent for secondary schools alone.

Truancy rates are highest among Maori and Pacific Island students and at large, low-decile, town-based, state secondary schools.

Mr Mallard said the statistics revealed in the report were not good enough despite being similar to the two previous attendance studies.

The report showed that at any one time in any one class, one child was absent, and that was a real concern.

One of the main aims of the programme is to make it easier for schools to prosecute parents who permit their children to wag by developing a basic checklist which would enable officials, rather than Crown lawyers, to take the cases.

Mr Mallard said there had been few successful prosecutions to date and it was largely uncharted territory.

"I think it is appropriate that people are prosecuted in extreme cases," he said.

"Even if the fines are not high, people can expect to appear in court."

The maximum fine for allowing a child to be away from school without a reasonable excuse is $150.

The minister said in "no case" was he allowed to direct a prosecution in any individual case.

National Party education spokesman Dr Nick Smith said the measures looked more like a public relations exercise than a serious attempt to tackle truancy.

Truancy services had had no funding increase for four years and $8.6 million would allow them only to restore services that had been cut.

Chasing truants

Shirley Maihi, from the Manurewa District Truancy Service, says the biggest problem is dealing with parents who do not seem to care whether their children are at school.

She says the extra funding is desperately needed. Although the South Auckland district has one of the highest truancy rates in the country, it has only two officers, who are just coping with demand.

Mrs Maihi says she doubts how effective email or text messages will be as many of the households the truancy service deals with do not have telephones.

She says that a system allowing students to be tracked between schools is vital because Manurewa schools have a 75 per cent roll turnover and they have no way of finding out what happens to students once they leave the area.