Schools Set Sights On Truants

Now that Prince George's County schools are back in session, the Board of Education is taking aim at one of the district's most serious problems: truancy.

While Prince George's educators have been celebrating increasing test scores among their 130,000 students, Superintendent John E. Deasy noted in an address to teachers last week that the county faces plenty of challenges. One of the toughest is getting its estimated 6,000 habitually truant students to go to school.

Roughly 80 percent of the truants are high-schoolers, but many -- about 300 students -- are in elementary school, said school board member Rosalind Johnson (District 1), who has spearheaded an anti-truancy initiative the school system planned to unveil yesterday.

She and fellow school board member Pat Fletcher (District 3) are planning to post fliers at businesses and air radio ads encouraging adults to call the police nonemergency line at 301-333-4000 to report suspected truants. Such students would be taken to their schools, and their parents would be called, Johnson said in an interview Tuesday. School board members and police are also going on walks in communities to draw attention to the problem, Johnson said.

She called the situation a crisis and said she aimed to "stamp out truancy. Simple. Stop it."

She said large groups of students sometimes hold "skipping parties," with gang initiations, drug use, drinking and sex.

"These kids are having huge parties during the school day," Johnson said. "Sometimes they have over 100 kids. No area is not involved."

In Largo, a rash of lawn-furniture thefts led authorities to a park where they found truant students had created an open-air living room, she said.

Even truants who aren't skipping school for nefarious reasons aren't learning, Fletcher said: "An idle mind is the devil's workshop," she said.

Fletcher said the anti-truancy measures are meant to be preventative. "We want our kids to learn and be successful," she said. "We want to protect them. They're my babies."

Vansville Elementary Noted for Being Green

The 800 students at Vansville Elementary School in Beltsville got a bonus along with the usual hubbub on the first day of classes Monday, as state and local officials flocked to the campus to tour the county's first fully "green" school.

It wasn't the school's color they were raving about. Vansville was certified 100 percent green under the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design system of the U.S. Green Building Council. It uses about 35 percent less energy than a typical school of its size.

The 94,800-square-foot building features a geothermal heating plant that uses the Earth's temperature to regulate heat without needing a boiler. Strategic use of natural light has reduced the need for using electric light fixtures during the day. The building materials are environmentally friendly, and 20 percent of them came from recycled sources.

The school got a thumbs-up from Peter Kelley of College Park, a volunteer presenter for the Climate Project, an environmental awareness group linked to former vice president and Nobel laureate Al Gore. Kelley said that buildings leave a larger carbon footprint than cars.

"If you personally are recycling and carpooling and driving a hybrid and turning the lights out and moving the thermostat, that can lower your footprint some, but if you're going to a school that's an energy hog, that's something you can't do much about," Kelley said. "Those of us who are looking to change things on a large scale, to do what it really takes to stop global warming, are inspired by this green school in Prince George's County."