Found Money

For the last few years, there's been an increasingly common complaint among schools: in the midst of a recession, the biggest source of school funding has begun to evaporate. Student truancies are depriving schools and districts of millions of dollars in funding every year -- but I want to offer a solution.

Last year, when I was a ninth grader, I decided to tackle the nationwide problem of truancy. After receiving first place at the Ventura County Science Fair, I enrolled my project, TruantToday (truanttoday.com) in the California State Science Fair. TruantToday sends realtime text and email messages to parents when students are absent, and helps bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars back into the school system. By way of an example: Oak Park Unified School District, which has about 4,000 students, loses over $700,000 per year.

Besides just bringing funding back into the school, TruantToday will also help to lower crime. LAUSD and LAPD teamed up to do a student recovery day, in which they rounded up all of the truant students in LAUSD and brought them back to school. On that one day alone, shoplifting plummeted 82 percent. In addition, the Justice Department released a study drawing a conclusive link between truancy and harmful behaviors later in life (i.e. -- gang membership, drug use, and teenage pregnancy).

Before the California State Science Fair, I tested TruantToday at a public high school in Staten Island, N.Y. The results were amazing: 50 percent of my chronically-truant student test group (or, students that miss more school than they attend) returned to class the same day that the TruantToday messages were sent out. In addition, 75 percent of students in the TruantToday test group improved their attendance during the pilot period. I ended up receiving 5th place at the state level.

After the science fair, I wanted to see TruantToday implemented in as many schools as possible--all for free. If you work at a school, are a parent of a student at a school, or are otherwise involved with a school, regardless of whether you have a truancy "problem," send me an email: zak [at] truanttoday.com. I want to help you eradicate truancy and boost your school's budget problem, all with a product that's been proven to work.

 

Follow Zak Kukoff on Twitter: www.twitter.com/kukoff

Comments

[Lenny25]

03:47 AM on 01/11/2011

Students are truant because LAUSD administration continues to socially promote them years beyond their ability to do the work without every addressing their needs with real remediation as early as possible with qualified teachers. By the time these students get to middle school and high school they are completely incapable of being engaged by single-subject credentialed teachers with no skills set to get them caught up and a substantive course to teach which requires these foundational skills. The adolescent ego is humiliated by this process, which accounts for why these student disrupt school, require a disproportionate amount of administrative time, which makes police out of administrators. Ultimately, over 50% of these students drop out, many join gangs, and many wind up filling our juvenile justice system at $73,000 a year. 334,000 in California Prison system is the largest factor for putting the states budget in the red. Wouldn't it be a whole lot cheaper to finally stop failing to educate students, so that they can live up to our racist preconceptions and see just how high these kids can fly with a good public education? At perdaily.com we will show you a picture of purposefully failed public education and the rather simple and straight forward way of changing it and in the same process giving our democracy a chance to continue as a government of the well educated people, which is the only way democracy survives.

[Insanity rules]

02:52 PM on 01/10/2011

How did the district lose money because of truancy? Or is this based on costs to track down truancy?

Commendable experiment, well thought out. Perhaps now that this is done you could concentrate on why students drop out of school and what measures other than punitive would be good to use. The rounding up of students by officers gives me the creeps. I'm not thinking that it would be a solution that will thrill parents. Nor is it a good use of officers time but the texting is great.
Also what do you think about having several tracks to graduation? I know there are state requirements that are lower than some colleges but I'm thinking of the type of tracks where Trig is not required for graduation but other courses are subsituted?

[Zak Kukoff]

06:56 PM on 01/10/2011

Hey Insanity,

Schools lose $28-40/day in Federal/State funding for every absent student. By bringing back students the same day messages are sent out (and by increasing student attendance overall) we help bring this lost funding back into the school system.

Hope that clears things up!

Zak Kukoff

[Insanity rules]

11:19 PM on 01/10/2011

I hadn't heard of this provision before. I will check this out for my state to see what their situation.