Each day in the United States well over one million middle and high school students will not attend any classes. Far from the whimsical popular culture portrayals of playing “hookey” in Huckleberry Finn or Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, chronic truancy virtually guarantees that these students will be socially and economically disadvantaged throughout their lives.
Truancy is the first step on the road to dropping out. Dropping out is the exit to underperformance and misery. And it isn’t just the truant student who suffers. Even the most conservative estimates cite the direct economic cost to the community of one student who drops out of school to be in excess of $200,000. If one considers lost wages, taxes, and other social costs over a lifetime, the impact rises to over one million dollars per dropout.
Communities, states, and even nations throughout the world are struggling to identify effective programs and policies to combat this social challenge. One of the difficulties with truancy prevention is that it touches so many fields of social activity that it gets lost between efforts. Law enforcement, family law, psychology, education, and politics all converge to influence the debate over effective responses. Within the context of this diversity of disciplines there is a rising consensus that something must be done about the problem before it gets too big to fix at all.
The front lines of the battle against truancy are staffed by school personnel and family and truancy court judges. It is these professionals who are charged with the mandate of “solving” the truancy epidemic even as it has become clear that no one party can handle the problem alone. Resolving the truancy and dropout epidemic takes the whole community working together with common purpose to protect, educate, and lead the new generation. To this end, social service organizations, government, and the private sector have joined to provide resources and best practices.
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