WASHINGTON, D.C. – Attorney General Karl A. Racine today announced that the Office of the Attorney General (OAG) will expand its program to help keep kids in school to two more schools in Ward 8.
The Addressing Truancy Through Engagement and Negotiated Dialogue (ATTEND) program is a diversion program OAG created to better serve families with young children who are not attending school regularly. The goal of the program is to address the underlying issues causing the chronic absences and avoid criminal prosecution of the parents. Starting today, the program will be in Simon Elementary School and John Hayden Johnson Middle School, both in Ward 8. ATTEND already is operating in four other schools, and it has successfully helped over 230 DC children and families improve school attendance.
“Children have a better chance of success when they attend school. That’s why OAG is committed to helping shrink truancy rates in the District and ensuring that every child gets the education they need and deserve,” said AG Racine. “Our office’s innovative ATTEND program has successfully fostered an environment that supports students, parents, and schools, and I’m incredibly excited to see the program expanding to two schools that most need this help.”
The four existing ATTEND sites include: Anita J. Turner Elementary School (Ward 8), W.B. Patterson Elementary School (Ward 8), Malcolm X Elementary School (Ward 8), and Sousa Middle School (Ward 7).
Launched in 2018, the program began as a pre-charging diversion program for truancy court referrals. In September 2019, District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) obtained a grant for Ward 8 elementary schools to address attendance, grades, and parent engagement. DCPS worked with OAG to create an in-school version of ATTEND to address the attendance and parent engagement parameters. In December 2019, OAG expanded ATTEND to include a prevention model for schools as part of its student support team (SST) interventions. Within its first 90 days of operation, ATTEND conducted 22 conferences, reaching agreements 100 percent of the time. During the 2021-2022 school year, OAG expanded to the middle school level to further support DCPS’s initiative to provide targeted interventions to students identified as newly chronically absent or repeaters.
For this program, OAG provides: a case manager if an agreement is reached, 90-day post mediation attendance supervision, and referrals to community-based supports. Another important component of the ATTEND Program is its outreach to the school communities. ATTEND’s prevention model included monthly parent engagement sessions. Participants identified topics such as housing, rental assistance, employment, and food resources and requested family fun activities like exercising to go-go and cooking meals on a budget. ATTEND hosted 10 monthly sessions January 2019-May 2021. The COVID-19 pandemic increased partner schools’ requests for support with daily living needs and access to services like life coaching for overwhelmed parents and guardians. Accordingly, ATTEND shifted to hosting quarterly, larger scale events that are open to the entire school community and surrounding neighborhoods. Three community events touched more than 230 people from September 2021 to April 2022.
Background
DC mandates school attendance at age 5 until age 18. A student is truant at 10 unexcused absences within a school year. Partner schools make a referral to OAG at seven unexcused absences for the prevention model in Wards 7 and 8. The ATTEND team helps families identify the barriers to school attendance and helps find solutions to overcoming the barriers.