Three nights a week, about a dozen volunteers from churches call parents to tell them their kids were absent from school. Morris donates a few hours each week for the experimental program that started this spring at five schools in northeast Philadelphia. City officials describe the volunteers as a first line of defense in reducing the number of kids who play hooky. Truancy rates are not tracked nationally, but the city's absentee rate, which includes students with or without a valid excuse, is more than double national figures.
Volunteers call regarding kids who have missed one or two days of class in the previous week.
Calls typically last only a few minutes, though parents sometimes are given the phone number for a school counselor. Diane Satterthwaite, a school district employee who helps coordinate the volunteers, said parents often express frustration or say they saw their children leave in the morning and assumed they were headed to school. The church volunteers are still mostly symbolic in the anti-truancy effort. On a good night, the volunteers may call several hundred parents out of the 15,000 kids who are absent each day. The city already has a patchwork of programs fighting truancy.