Ad Blitz Has Stern Message for County's Many Truants

The Prince George's County Board of Education is unleashing a barrage of television, radio and print advertising as part of a crackdown on one of the school system's most serious problems: the 6,000 students who are regularly skipping class.

The public relations campaign, which asks adults to call police if they see students out of class during school hours, takes aim at what school board member Rosalind Johnson called "a crisis in America." A sample video announcement, played at a news conference yesterday, begins with a clip from the class-cutting comedy movie "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" and later shows the grim consequences: a young man put in handcuffs and led to the county jail. The announcement is expected to run on a school system cable TV channel.

In most cases, a truant apprehended by police would be taken to school, not to jail. From there, the student's parents would be contacted, Johnson (District 1) said. But she did not rule out harsher measures for repeat offenders.

The 130,000-student school system "is going to enforce the law, which is compulsory attendance," Johnson said in an interview, during which she placed responsibility for regular attendance with parents. "If we have to jail them, I want them jailed."

School board member Pat Fletcher (District 3) agreed: "If it gets to that point, it has to get to that point."

The aggressive rhetoric was meant to address an intractable problem in Prince George's. Maryland's second-largest school system has the second-highest truancy rate, after Baltimore, according to state data. In the 2006-07 school year, 4.17 percent of county students were habitually truant, a state report said. In some high schools, the figure exceeded 20 percent. The same report said 0.97 percent of Montgomery County students were habitually truant, and the highest rate at a Montgomery high school was 5 percent.

About 80 percent of Prince George's truants are in high school, according to a county report. But Johnson said about 300 truant students are in elementary school, a figure she found distressing.

"I was stunned," she said. "If you have an out-of-control child, that is not a legally accepted reason. You cannot turn your back on your parental responsibility."

Fletcher said she hoped to cut the number of truants in half this year, to about 3,000.

John White, the school system's spokesman, said the cost of the anti-truancy program would be nominal.

"I haven't seen a coordinated effort like this" to address truancy, White said. "It's not that people don't know the problem exists -- schools have worked with individual parents before -- but you can see that it's been kind of isolated and in some cases a piecemeal approach."