Bartlesville Schools Get Tough On Truancy

Bartlesville schools are getting tough on truancy. If a student repeatedly skips school, the district is going after the parents.<br/><br/>One mother now faces jail time because of her students' absences.

Monday, January 8th 2007, 2:41 pm

By: News On 6

Bartlesville schools are getting tough on truancy. If a student repeatedly skips school, the district is going after the parents.

One mother now faces jail time because of her students' absences. News on 6 reporter Ashli Sims has the story.

Bartlesville school leaders are giving parents a wake-up call. Your child needs to be in school, and chronic skipping is not acceptable.

"What we want to do, our main goal, our main mission is make sure kids are in the classroom," Assistant Principal John Hammack said.

In general, most Bartlesville students make it to class on a regular basis. But district attendance officer Fred Auschwitz says there is a handful of students who repeatedly miss school, some for as many as 90 days without a valid excuse. The school tried sending home letters to get those students back in school, but they were often ignored. Now they're working with the district attorney to give their truancy policy some teeth.

"Now when you send those letters out and it says that I'm going to send this to the DA. They have a tendency to get back with you and let us try to work that out," Fred Auschwitz, Safe and Drug Free Schools Coordinator said.

If the parents of chronically truant students don't respond to a notice from the district, the DA takes over and they could end up behind bars. Jail time is a last resort, but one they're not afraid to use.

"We put a mother in jail for a couple of weeks. It was a very chronic case. She just ignored us," said Auschwitz.

And just this year, another mother Tara Cox was sentenced to three days in jail. She had two children missing school; one was absent 30 times just this year.

Bartlesville school leaders say their get tough policy is working.

"We had about seven or eight cases that people have pled guilty or no contest to that they're kids have been back in school. They've completed their probation period of a year. And those kids are in school. So yes it does work," Auschwitz said.

A student has to be absent four times in four weeks or ten times in a semester, before the school takes action. The district also works with children and family services, DHS, and other agencies to help parents come up with a plan to get their kids back in school.