It’s one thing to get children enrolled in school. It’s another to get them to show up or their parents to bring them every day.
Mississippi for a couple of decades has had a system in place designed to reduce truancy, but according to the reporting by Mississippi Today, the system is overwhelmed and thus not working all that well.
At one point, state law mandated that there should be at least one truancy officer for every 2,500 students, but that requirement was removed in 1998. In some counties, the ratio is now more than four times that.
Some of the truancy officers told Mississippi Today that, as a result of the high caseload, they spend most of their time pushing paper instead of getting to the bottom of why a student is excessively absent and working to resolve the impediment.
It doesn’t help the truancy officers’ morale either that some have gone more than a decade without a pay raise, while teachers have been steadily seeing their compensation rise, including the historically large hike that was enacted last year.
If Mississippi expects the truancy officers to be effective, it needs to be sure there are enough of them and to pay them fairly.
