This placement will accept students from any of the Emory schools including the College. Educational neglect, which is a statutory form of deprivation in Georgia, occurs when a parent fails to send a young child to school on a regular basis. Sometimes, the educational neglect is the only outward sign of a more serious deprivation. In New York City, a nine-year old girl was found dead from serious physical abuse, yet the only sign of her distress was her absence from school, which was never investigated until it was too late. Most of the time, educational neglect at an early age sets the stage for more entrenched truancy as the child ages through the education system.
Truancy is one of the factors that contributes to a risk for future delinquency.
While not every Truant goes on to commit crime, virtually all adult prisoners have a truancy background. Dealing with the education deprivation early in a child's life may have a significant impact in reducing the risk of future delinquency and future crime. While the Court has addressed educational neglect cases for approximately three years, it has never been able to analyze the effectiveness of the intervention effort. The student intern would be asked to review case files to compile meaningful inferences about the effectiveness of this form of early intervention and may produce hypotheses or theories that may be the subject of future research efforts. The student intern will also be asked to follow up on certain cases to determine the lasting effect, if any, of the intervention effort.