An Early Truancy Intervention Model: The TASC Program

Background and purpose: Truancy, or chronic absenteeism, is defined as unexcused and unlawful absence from school. Previous research has shown that75% of chronic truants fail to graduate from high school compared with 3% of non-truants. In addition to serving as an indicator of dropping out of school, truancy is significantly associated with weak school bonding, poor academic performance, and increased costs for schools. School drop-outs have a much greater potential for being low-paid employees, jobless, dependants of social welfare, and having other serious problems, such as teen pregnancy, substance abuse, juvenile delinquency, and even adult criminality. To effectively break this negative cycle, early identification and intervention is needed; change is much more difficult to effect once habitual truancy is established. The Truancy Assessment and Service Centers (TASC) in Louisiana is such an intervention program, targeting K-5 grade students. TASC is a comprehensive case management service model that relies on collaborations among local service providers. It began as a pilot program in 1999 and has now expanded to 21 sites across the state. The objective of this study is to show the effectiveness of TASC by tracking children before and after intervention. This study examines two hypotheses: Following intervention, TASC children have a) better attendance and b) better academic performance. Methods: A pre- and post-test study design was conducted in one of the TASC sites in 2006. This study used the TASC database of approximately 80,000 k-5 high risk public school children, reported by case managers over the course of years. Two dependent variables, proportion of absence and school performance, were used to assess the program's effectiveness. Proportion of absence was calculated by the number of absences divided by the total number of school days before and after the child entered the TASC program in that year. Pass or fail rates at the end of the school year measures school performance. Level of risk for truancy is categorized at 3 levels (called “functions”) as assessed by case managers using a structured assessment tool. Descriptive statistics were used to show the results. Results: For Function 1 (minor risk) children involved in TASC, proportion of absences dropped from .069 to .05 after TASC intervention. For Function 2 children (high risk) this proportion dropped from .128 to .077. No differences were found for Function 3 children (highest risk). No differences were found among children for pass/fail rates by comparing with pass/fail rates in the previous year. Conclusion and implications: The TASC program helps truant children stay in school, but it only serves a small percentage of high risk children in Louisiana. The TASC model should not only be expanded across Louisiana, but across other states with a large percentage of high risk children and high dropout rates.