Combat truancy first

Guest writers Randy Zook and Gary Newton say it is bad news that at the current rate it will take 20 years for all Arkansas kids to be competent in reading. Bad news? I would rejoice if I thought it will happen.

Highly trained, well-supplied teachers can’t teach kids who aren’t in class, and in Arkansas, they aren’t in class. In reality, school attendance here is not compulsory. It is voluntary. Truancy is a big problem in Arkansas schools. Consider this: If a student misses on average 12 days per semester, by the ninth grade he has missed a year of school. No reading program can make up for that.

The attendance numbers schools turn in to the state mask the problem. A school can turn in a respectable attendance number and still have a big attendance problem among the lower 20 percent, the group that doesn’t read well. Prosecutors are swamped; they want schools to enforce attendance but schools can’t, no more than they can enforce traffic laws. They don’t have the will or the authority. They try to educate parents by sending them letters and making phone calls. I admit it would help if schools retained more kids who are chronically truant.

Not many truant kids end up in juvenile court, and their parents, who are breaking the law, rarely get fined. How many people would obey traffic laws if no one got fined?

There is only one fix: The state should refuse to give the thousands of dollars per pupil per year expenditure to schools when those pupils are chronically truant. When that happens, alarmed superintendents will meet with prosecuting attorneys and chiefs of police, and parents will start getting citations for truancy and will have to appear in municipal court and pay fines. The word will spread. Attendance will improve.

Zook and Newton are trying to do a great thing, a heroic thing. They will fail without the help of the school systems and the legal system. It’s a shame. JOHN J. CASEY Fort Smith