Burglary. Teen pregnancy. Slumping school budgets. Speaking in
two fleeting minutes before county supervisors, Frank Valadez tried
to summarize why Gilroy needs Lois Baer, the deputy district
attorney who lays down the law to truant kids countywide.
Gilroy – Burglary. Teen pregnancy. Slumping school budgets. Speaking in two fleeting minutes before county supervisors, Frank Valadez tried to summarize why Gilroy needs Lois Baer, the deputy district attorney who lays down the law to truant kids countywide.
“Our community can little afford to sever the ties between the legal system and families with truant children,” he argued, as neon-red seconds ticked past on a digital timer at a long-running county budget hearing.
But the county can’t afford to keep Baer either, supervisors worry. Drastic budget cuts have put the $316,364 truancy program on the chopping block, a casualty of a $4.9 million deficit at the district attorney’s office. Few dispute the program’s success: Sixty-four percent of high schoolers prosecuted for truancy countywide never go truant again, according to recent figures from District Attorney Dolores Carr. Among elementary students, success rates leap to 85 percent. But as Carr tries to trim more than 7 percent of the office’s budget, Baer’s job is in peril – and so are Gilroy kids, said Valadez.
Baer is the end of the line for truant kids. After three unexcused student absences, Gilroy schools mail a letter home; a fourth absence prompts a second letter. If the child skips school again, they’re considered habitually truant, and sent either to the School Attendance Review Board (if they’re younger than 12) or to mediation (if they’re older.) And if that doesn’t work, kids or their parents get a court date with Baer, who can issue hefty fines and hours of community service, or even withhold a teen’s driver’s license.
“She wakes those kids up and lets them know – if they don’t have a license, maybe they never will,” said Joseph Lugo, a retired deputy probation counselor currently serving on Gilroy’s attendance review board. “It’s an incredible amount of power she can yield.”
And it’s a power schools are loath to lose, especially with precious attendance funds in the balance. Decades ago, before Baer kicked off the DA’s program, schools had little leverage when faced with delinquent teens or careless parents who didn’t bring their kids to school, said Jenelle Klauer, an attendance liaison at Brownell and South Valley middle schools.
“What did we have to make it stick?” Klauer asked. “Parents knew we couldn’t really do anything. They almost laughed at us.”
Truancy isn’t just a problem for schools: When kids aren’t in class, they’re more likely to brew trouble, said School Resource Officer Cherie Somavia. From January to March 2007, Gilroy police picked up 14 truant kids during “sweep days” and made seven truancy home visits, according to first-quarter crime reports prepared by crime analyst Phyllis Ward. Among the delinquent boys Lugo counseled at Williams F. James Boys Ranch in Morgan Hill, “all had chronic truancy,” he said. Asked to quantify her program’s impact, Baer becomes frustrated.
“There’s no way to measure an impact that doesn’t happen,” Baer insisted. “If a family is sent to me because they have a fifth-grader that’s not going to school, and that fifth-grader stays in school, never gets involved in crime, never becomes a teen mom or dad, never gets involved in drugs – there’s no way to calculate those savings.”
But in the painful calculus of which county programs stay and which don’t, decision-makers are demanding hard data. To the members of the county’s Truancy Abatement Collaborative, hunkered down in a dim conference room at San Jose’s Franklin-McKinley Board of Education, the answer is obvious: By all means necessary, save Lois Baer. And if that means school districts ponying up their own funds to enforce the law, so be it.
Supervisors Blanca Alvarado and Ken Yeager have proposed that schools split the costs of the truancy program 50-50 with the DA’s office. It’s an idea schools are willing to consider: San Jose Unified and East Side Union High school districts are already chipping in for the truancy program as some of its heaviest users of the program. Gilroy Unified School District, another significant user, has never paid for the program, because the district is relatively low-budget, Valadez said.
Schools are willing to spend money to get money: Average Daily Attendance funds disbursed by the state poured more than $33 million into GUSD’s budget this year. The more kids attend school, the more money the district gets – to the tune of about $39 per student per day. Increased attendance has increased school funding nearly $600,000 in the last three years, Valadez estimated.
“Truancy abatement is probably one of the most revenue-generating programs” in the county, said Javier Aguirre, a Gilroy school trustee who works as Alvarado’s policy aide. “There’s a cost, but you make up the cost by insuring that kids return to school.”
The program costs $316,364 each year, $259,359 in salaries and benefits to Baer and investigators and $57,005 in services and supplies. Under Alvarado and Yeager’s plan, the 12 schools in the county that use the program would split half of the program cost: Aguirre said Gilroy’s share would likely fall between $10,000 and $20,000 annually. The Truancy Abatement Collaborative is currently mulling how to divide the costs between the 12 schools, accounting both for which schools use the program most, and which have the funds to spare.
Truancy abatement is only one of a slew of programs under siege at the DA’s office. Popular programs such as the Innocence Project, the Cold Case Unit and Community Prosecution could be axed; the Elder Fraud Unit and the Bureau of Investigation may be pared down to keep as many prosecutors in the courtroom as possible, Carr said. Still, Lugo hopes the county can spare one prosecutor, to keep as many kids in the classroom as possible.
“What’s really sad is that they’re losing out,” he said. “Sometimes you need someone to give you that proverbial kick in the butt.”
