The Columbus Dispatch

10/2/2007

By DAVID J. CROSS

The profile of a typical truant Columbus City School District student is a 16-year-old boy, most likely a loner, who doesn’t want to be in school midweek.

The Columbus Board and City Standing Committee recently discussed an early report that tackled truancy in the district.

Among the data the report provided, the majority of students who are found skipping school were 16-year-old black boys.

Columbus police officials, however, emphasized that the report was incomplete. More than half of the 150 or so reported incidents came from the district’s “center city” quadrant because of a crackdown on truancy in the area.

“We may not just have the officers up there in the area,” said Lt. Gary Cameron, commenting on other regions in the city that were not represented in the report.

The report stated 71 percent of students who were caught were boys. It stated 63 percent of the logged incidences involved black students and 32 percent involved white students.

In addition, students are most likely to skip school on a Wednesday or a Thursday, and about 66 percent of the time, incidents involved a single student, the report stated.

Student mostly were caught somewhere between 10:30 and 11:30 a.m. with in two miles of their residences, police said.

Cameron said the city was starting to come down on truancy because safety officials noted a correlation between students not being in school and daytime thefts.

“We’ll get Jimmy opening a sliding-glass door and stealing some video games,” Cameron said.

He said the most telling piece of information from the report was that the students were mostly freshmen and sophomores.

Sgt. Fay Gordon said catching truant students is a preventative measure.

“If they are in school, they are in a safer environment in general,” Gordon said.

“Other things go wrong other than sneaking into a house.”

City Councilman Andrew Ginther serves on the committee as a city representative and formerly was a Board of Education member. Aside from helping protect students, he said, the crackdown forces students to stay in school and, ultimately, learn more.

Most of the information in the report came from Columbus police’s Zone 5, which is bordered by East Hudson Avenue and Mock Street on the north, Frebis Avenue on the south, railroad tracks on the west and Alum Creek on the east.

Police officers in the zone began enforcing truancy along with their normal duties as a special zone-specific project. This year three officer have been charged with keeping tabs on wandering students who should be in school.

Cameron said other zones might find it difficult to enforce truancy to the same level Zone 5 did.

“The challenge for the other zone commanders is each zone has a its own personality, their own issues,” Cameron said.