When Taniya Bowling was a freshman in high school, she regularly missed class because she had to take care of her baby sister while her mom was working. She was considered truant, or absent from school without a valid excuse for 10 days. At 14 years old, Bowling struggled to keep up with her schoolwork while raising her sister and adjusting to a new online learning environment brought on by the 2020 lockdown.

“A lot of students or kids in general suffer with the same type of story as me where they … can’t go to school,” Bowling said during a D.C. Council hearing Wednesday. “They don’t have the luxury of homeschool because they don’t have people to assist them with home life. Where they don’t have people to help them understand what they’re doing in class. Where they don’t have ways to actually understand the material being given to them.”

Bowling, now an incoming senior, said she was able to find ways to attend class and stay on top of her schoolwork thanks to the counselors at Friendship Tech Prep High School. But her case isn’t the standard; it’s the exception. Chronic absenteeism, when students are absent for at least 10 percent of the school year, is up by 14 percent in D.C. since prepandemic rates.

In the 2022-23 school year, 43 percent of K-12 D.C. students were chronically absent, and 37 percent were truant, according to a report from the Office of the State Superintendent of Education. Significantly, 60 percent of D.C. high schoolers were considered chronically absent.

“We know that there are a whole host of reasons for why students might miss class ranging from arriving late due to taking a sibling to the campus, lack of reliable public transit, … trouble in the home, or violence in the neighborhood,” Ward 6 Councilmember Charles Allen said. “But here’s something I think we can all agree on. Students need to be in school.”

Councilmembers and Mayor Muriel Bowser have authored a total of four bills to address D.C.’s chronic absenteeism and truancy problem—all of which were the topic of Wednesday’s Committee of the Whole meeting. Collectively, the bills would require the OSSE to publish monthly absenteeism data on its website, expand the set of valid excuses for absences, provide additional funding to address chronic absenteeism, and designate schools that reach a chronic absenteeism rate of 20 percent or higher as priority zones for the Safe Passage Safe Blocks program.

“This is more than just about attendance. This is also about public safety,” Council Chair Phil Mendelson said. “It’s about protecting kids from becoming victims. It’s also about protecting society from youth who are missing school and go on to commit violent crime.”

Bowser’s bill, Utilizing Partnerships and Local Interventions for Truancy and Safety Amendment Act, attracted special scrutiny during the hearing. Bowser’s bill would direct the Department of Human Services to intervene before a truant student is referred to the Child and Family Services Agency—effectively shifting the responsibility of addressing the underlying causes of truancy from one agency to the other. 

Mendelson, Allen and Ward 4 Councilmember Janeese Lewis George questioned DHS’s capacity to take on referrals that are currently handled by CFSA, given the agency’s other commitments. 

DHS Director Laura Zeilinger defended the department’s capacity to take on the role. She highlighted its Parent and Adolescent Support Services Intensive Case Management program, a voluntary early intervention support service. She also said DHS could launch a pilot education program for high school students involved in violent crime to get personalized support at an alternative school site staffed with social workers.

Eduardo Ferrer, policy director of Georgetown’s Juvenile Justice Initiative, agrees that DHS is better suited to address truant and chronically absent children.

“The child welfare system is often seen as being very punitive and often can be punitive. And so families don’t trust it, they don’t engage with it,” Ferrer said in an interview. “The Department of Human Services does have very high-quality programming when it comes to young people.”

CFSA Director Robert Matthews departed from his predecessor’s stance in asserting that DHS is better suited to support truancy cases than CFSA. Although Mendelson argued to keep the status quo and that it’s within CFSA’s responsibility to provide support services, Matthews believes CFSA’s involvement does more harm than good and has historically referred support services to community-based organizations.

“The involvement of child welfare has not moved the needle in improving chronic absenteeism nationally,” Matthews said. “We do have a supportive agency in doing our work. But I want to be very clear that when we come knocking at the door, it is not as if families are welcoming CFSA in their home by virtue of what could result in their child getting separated from them.”

Bowser’s bill would also direct the attorney general’s office to prosecute parents of students who’ve accrued 25 or more absences. They could alternatively receive a referral to mandatory participation with DHS for a family conference or the Alternatives to the Court Experience Diversionary program.

First Assistant Attorney General Lauren Haggerty asserted that prosecution is not the answer to truancy and that early intervention handled by a central agency should be a key provision in the forthcoming legislation. 

“While prosecution of students or parents may seem appealing in the abstract it makes little sense when applied to truancy,” Haggerty said. “When we prosecute a child or their parent for truancy, the court cannot help the parent find a job or department nor can order tutoring services or put a stop to bullying. The court cannot provide any of the social services and support needed to remove barriers to attendance.

“Ultimately, the child or parent will likely be referred back to the same report support services at other district agencies except this time we send them with a criminal record,” Haggerty said.

Illness, trauma, transportation, housing, and community violence are all barriers that can stop students from coming to school, several public witnesses noted. They might also struggle academically, socially or behaviorally, be disengaged, or have misconceptions, such as not understanding the impact of absences. 

Councilmembers and witnesses were largely supportive of the Chronic Absenteeism and Truancy Reduction Amendment Act’s provisions that require data collection (though some expressed concerns over increased workload for teachers) with the goal of identifying the root causes of why some kids miss so much school.

“Let’s make sure we get the right solution to this complex problem because all of our students have a lot of good stuff in them,” Washington Teachers Union Vice President Regina Bell said.