Lafourche DA announces plan to crack down on truants

Students from Lafourche Parish who miss school for no apparent reason will be hit with stricter penalties, Lafourche Parish District Attorney Cam Morvant warned.

Morvant appeared before the Lafourche Parish School Board at its monthly meeting last Wednesday and explained his plan to stop truancy.

Morvant said a full-time truancy officer who works strictly for the district attorney’s office is making arrests and even considering suspending repeat offenders’ driver’s licenses.

Truancy affects 8 percent of Lafourche Parish’s students, according to the district attorney. In Lafourche Parish, 650 students met the criteria of being truants last school year, he noted.

“Being a former educator, (I know) truancy is important,” Morvant said. “When students don’t go to school and they miss school for several days at a time, then come back they fall behind in the lesson. It’s not only going to affect them personally, it’s going to affect the students around them. They are not going to know what’s going on and it is going to cause a problem for the students in the classroom.”

Although Lafourche’s truancy rate is lower than neighboring parishes – it is 20 percent in Assumption and 18 percent in Terrebonne parishes – Morvant said he is still not satisfied and expects that number to dwindle even more.

Terrebonne Parish is enforcing stricter penalties for unexcused absences this school year, including failing students in a course after eight missed classes.

Before launching Lafourche Parish’s tougher truancy program, Morvant said he met with Sheriff Craig Webre and organized a plan that would appoint a truancy officer to work with the district attorney’s office. The position is paid by Webre’s office.

“I’ve committed to do that for a year,” he told the board. “I was going to commit to do it on a permanent basis, but I want to give it a year to see how it does.” At year’s end, Morvant said he intended to return to the school board to renegotiate the deal.

“This person is going to work for me, work for the DA’s office and be commissioned by the sheriff’s office,” the district attorney explained. “He will go to the homes of chronic truants and find out why they are not going to school.”

Parents who allow their children to continuously miss school could find themselves accountable, Morvant warned.

“Whether it’s (the parents’) fault for not babysitting the second- or third grader and making sure they go to school or a teenager’s fault for boarding the bus and getting off two blocks later, we will look at everything,” he said.

Lafourche Parish School Board Superintendant Jo Ann Matthews said truants tend to fall behind and can often hold their classmates back.

“If children are not attending school, it affects their academics,” she said. “Will they be successful on ILEAP (Integrated Louisiana Education Assessment Program) or LEAP (Louisiana Education Assessment Program) and will they graduate? We cannot help our children succeed if they don’t attend school. If they show up periodically, they’ve missed half of the lessons, half of the information and by then, it’s too late.”

In serious cases of truancy, Morvant said he’s been given permission to arrest violators.

However, Morvant said that would be the absolute last resort unless circumstances suggest otherwise. Last year, 146 bills of information were filed against parents of Lafourche Parish students.

Suspending violators’s driver’s licenses is another option Morvant is exploring. Because most people rely on their vehicles to go to work and essential services, he said it would also be a last resort option.

“After doing this work for 27 years, I have found that you have to have a big hammer sometimes to get people’s attention to do the things they are supposed to do,” Morvant said. “Getting your license suspended for missing too much school is something that’ll grab their attention.”

In other board news, the official enrollment for the 2009-10 school year was released. Officials said 14,655 students were enrolled as of last Wednesday.