As early as 2003, Irish schools introduced a system of SMS notification to parents about children's absence during roll call. True, schoolchildren were not very willing to provide their parents' mobile phone numbers. Still, the system became widespread, because parents themselves are interested in their children attending classes. And not only because they understand the importance of education for their children's future. In the UK and Ireland, there is punishment for negligent parents: if their son or daughter systematically skips lessons, they can pay a substantial fine (1-2.5 thousand pounds sterling) or even go to jail for up to three months.
Reports about truants come not only from teachers. Every year in April-May, British police patrol the streets and check documents of every child or teenager of school age. Annually, special units manage to detain more than 10 thousand young truants, many of whom skip classes with the knowledge and permission of their parents.
True, there are pleasant exceptions: in 2007, 18-year-old British woman Michelle Burman set an attendance record. Over 14 years of primary and secondary education, she did not miss a single one of the 2,660 school days. Michelle was guided not by fear of letting her parents down or getting caught by police, but by an interest in learning. The girl graduated from school with excellent grades.
German authorities considered display stands with new games in shopping centers to be one of the dangerous temptations. Politicians proposed an initiative to oblige store owners to turn off these stands during school hours, so that children go to play only after lessons. According to authorities, it is truants who later join criminal groups and become involved in various crimes. Indeed, in different countries around the world, cases have been recorded where teenagers did not attend classes for months due to computer games, but most often this happened because of addiction to MMORPGs.
The furthest in controlling attendance went US authorities. To combat truancy, the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Justice, and several public organizations joined forces. It turned out that forcing the most chronic truants to wear a GPS navigator on their belt to track the teenager's location is significantly cheaper than transferring a truant-prone student to home schooling or placing them in a correctional facility. One US resident allocated $26 thousand for the implementation of this program.
The New York Times reports the story of 18-year-old Ricardo Pacheco from Dallas, who was provided with such a device in 2007. The young man says that friends advised him to simply throw away the navigator, but it was precisely because of the stimulus created by constant monitoring that Ricardo resumed attending classes. Now he may become the first man in his family to receive a high school diploma: all others were expelled, many of his relatives are in prison. And the young man himself, before joining the program, led a local criminal gang. Moreover, by the age of 18, he had already become a father twice.
Throughout the United States, every schoolchild has an ID similar to a student card, regardless of whether they attend a private or public school. Police often stop teenagers on the street to find out why they are not in class during school hours. They particularly keep an eye on teenagers in shopping and entertainment centers, sports fields, and parks.
The US takes truancy seriously: online one can find instructions for parents who suspect their children are skipping classes, manuals for schoolchildren explaining why they should go to school, and data on the number of truants by age, gender, race, and state.
Interestingly, occasional truancy due to good weather or an upcoming test is indulged in by practically all students from time to time. But systematic non-attendance is usually the lot of children from disadvantaged families. Often these same schoolchildren exhibit drug addiction, suicide attempts, and strained relationships with peers. Many minor offenses are also committed during truancy. For example, statistics over recent decades show that on days of increased police attention to idle teenagers, the number of shoplifting incidents and vandalism decreases.
The wave of combating truancy with the help of the most modern technical means has not yet reached us. The prospect of introducing electronic passes that would allow collecting accurate information on attendance and taking timely measures is distant for most schools. And the warm May weather has led to the fact that Russian and Kazakhstani blogs of schoolchildren are simply overflowing with advice on truancy: 'experts' recommend their peers to rub their face with wool and put drops in their eyes to pretend to be sick, write a note from parents, say that relatives came from another city... In short, nothing new in the last hundred years.
Yulia SAVITSKAYA.
