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Thursday, April 28, 2005
Out of the Mouths of Truants
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Today I was a Career Day speaker at DeKalb Truancy School, a program for students who got in trouble for missing too many days of school. About 50 middle and high school students attend the school at one time. They get smaller classes and more attention from their teachers. They don’t get a school bus driving up to their door to pick them up, though. They have to take MARTA.
So, I was in luck. A veteran teacher gave a presentation before mine, and she got the class completely under control. Never raised her voice, either. She talked about the difference between legal money and illegal money, and told them teaching may not bring you a lot of money, but it is all legal and you can use it to buy a house, a car, an airline ticket, which is not always the case with ill-gotten gains. She had these kids’ full attention.
When it was my turn, oh joy!, there was some residual discipline left over from the teacher. The class was extremely attentive and respectful to me.
I talked about my writing career and asked if they had any questions. They wanted to know what I knew about the recent crimes in Clayton County. Some had connections to one of the victims. We talked about what it’s like to live in a neighborhood where violence is the norm. I told them education opens up more choices in where you live.
I showed them a story I wrote about DeKalb Superintendent Crawford Lewis getting a raise from $190,000 to $215,000. A student raised her hand. “Is Mr. Lewis… what race is he?” I told her he is black. She said: “A black man making all that money???”
I walked away from this Career Day thinking we need more alternative schools for kids with a variety of problems. This school is exclusively for chronic truants. They have other problems, too, but the “presenting” problem is that they generally hate traditional school.
In a traditional school, I suspect all these kids would be sitting at the back of the classroom. Some would be cutting up and others would be sleeping. But at the Truancy School, classes are small, about a dozen or so kids, so there is no real back of the classroom.
Since these kids would otherwise not be in school, it’s not a money drain, either. The district gets state funding for them it would not get if the kids were at home watching television or running the streets.
Not every kid can be saved, but some can, and are, at the DeKalb Truancy School.
