By the end of her freshman year at Pioneer Valley High School, Janna Munoz had earned only a handful of credits toward graduation and had practically stopped going to school altogether.

It appeared certain that it was merely a matter of time before Janna would become a statistic — one of the roughly 21.5 percent of California students who drop out of high school.

Eventually, help in the form of a truancy prevention program run by the Santa Barbara County District Attorney’s Office got Janna, now 17, back on track and back in the classroom.

Now just 15 credits shy of graduation, the teen will start courses at Hancock College in January to fulfill her goal of becoming a nurse.

However, as the state’s financial situation continues to erode, other students like Janna will no longer have the opportunity to benefit from the truancy program, which the county Board of Supervisors recently voted to stop funding.

And, for the time being, local school districts — themselves overworked and strapped for cash — will have no choice but to pick up the slack.

“For me personally (the program’s loss) was very distressing because I do believe this program is effective,” said Gene Martinez, chief assistant district attorney for North County.

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Facing dramatic state budget cuts, the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors in October elected to cancel the truancy prevention program when a motion to continue funding the program came out two votes shy of passing.

The motion required four votes to pass, and only Supervisors Brooks Firestone and Joni Gray favored it.

The death of the Truancy Intervention and Parent Accountability Program came 11 years after its birth in 1997, when the District Attorney’s Office formed a partnership with several local school districts and county agencies to create a proactive way to fight juvenile crime and delinquency.

According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, high school dropouts comprise more than 82 percent of America’s prison population.

Thus, the goal of Santa Barbara County’s five-step truancy prevention program was to track truant students at an early stage and provide them with any services they may need to help them stay in school. Only as a last resort would the students be referred to juvenile court and put on probation.

“None of (the program) is ever meant to be punitive ... We know families need help,” program Supervisor Maite Franck said.

The reasons for truancy remain as numerous and diverse as the truants themselves, experts say.

In several cases, students have stayed home from school for extended periods to baby-sit younger siblings while a parent worked; still other students skipped class because they owned only one or two changes of clothing and grew tired of being ridiculed by their peers.

For Janna, the emotional upheaval that resulted from the living situation at her mother’s house “not working out,” and when she had to move into a relative’s home, she said, she lost all motivation to attend school.

The truancy program was triggered once a student had three unexcused absences, prompting the school to send out a letter — on District Attorney’s Office letterhead — to the student’s parent.

After three more unexcused absences, the student and his or her parents got an “invitation” to attend a group meeting after school. If the truant behavior continued, the student and his or her parents were required to attend an individual meeting with the District Attorney’s Truancy Mitigation Team to determine what would happen next.

It was after this third step that Janna decided to get her act together and begin the counseling that her case worker prescribed.

“That’s what I needed,” Janna said of the counseling and personal attention she received. “I just wanted to do good, and I wanted to be one of (my grandmother’s) grandchildren who succeeded ... I wanted to do something instead of being home and doing nothing with my life.”

In the fourth step, a truant student must go before the School Attendance Review Board, which decides whether to refer the case to the county Probation Department. Once Probation receives the case, officers place the juvenile under either formal or informal probation.

The program’s formula apparently worked. Last year, 5,987 students in the Santa Maria, Guadalupe and Orcutt areas received the initial letter, but just three of those cases made it to the Probation Department.

Now schools, with their limited resources, must take on the astronomical task of putting together their own similarly structured program if they want to continue fighting truancy and preventing the crime and associated costs that often come with it.

In Tuesday’s Lompoc Record: School districts create their own plan to fight truancy.

November 30, 2008