“Not Present or Accounted For": Part 12

The following is a transcript of Part 12 of the radio series “Not Present or Accounted For: The Attendance Crisis in Baltimore Schools,” which was supported by a grant from the Open Society Institute-Baltimore.

To fully understand how years of declining school attendance has impacted Baltimore, you have to look back in order to move forward. So says Robert Embry Jr., a Baltimorean and president of the Abell Foundation, a local charity that focuses on education and urban issues.

"When I went to high school in Baltimore, which was 50 years ago, the school population was 192,000 students and the schools were segregated," Embry said. "They weren’t integrated until my senior year in high school in 1955, after the Brown Supreme Court decision and the school system was overwhelming Caucasian and there weren’t any statistics on who was going to school and who was dropping out and what attendance and so forth. It was just sort of assumed that people wanted to go to school, and if they didn’t want to go, fine, that that was their business, it wasn’t society’s business."

Embry has headed both the city school board and the Maryland State Board of Education. He was educated in city schools during a radically different era. Blacks and whites attended segregated schools. And blue collar jobs were plenty for those with and without a high school diploma.

Over the span of his career, Embry has witnessed the steady decline in school enrollment to 82,000, in tandem with an exodus of the middle class because of crime and poverty. What followed was an avalanche of social problems and the devastating crack epidemic of the 1980s.

It is one way, sadly, to put today’s attendance crisis into context. He spoke of Frederick Douglass High School, focus of a negative HBO documentary last year.

 "When schools were segregated, at Douglass High School,  the value of education was unquestioned," he said. "The culture of Douglass and of the middle schools and elementary schools was set by the African American middle class who saw education as the way out of second class citizenship, but with the removal of the constraints of segregated housing, much of that population has moved to the suburbs the same way as much of the white ethnic immigrants second or third generation moved out of the city, into the suburbs."

All this has radically impacted public education here for generations.

Data from Kids Count, an annual report by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, shows that in 2006, nearly a quarter of Baltimore’s children lived in a household headed by a high school dropout. Eighteen percent of city teens that year were not attending high school or employed. In addition, 50 percent of the city’s children lived in families where no parent had full-time, year-round employment.

Such statistics have been insurmountable in tackling truancy and school attendance, Embry said: "Unless we’re willing to significantly take on the concentration of poverty in this city, the likelihood of dramatically affecting this issue is really in question."

What, then, can be done?

While school leaders rejoiced this fall over a jump in attendance figures, there’s still a long way to go. Beginning at home and in the classroom.

"Many of these schools have no PTA, they have no father who is involved with the school, have very few parents who have a college degree, or only a few years of college so they’re living in a community that disproportionately they don’t see the advantages, or even the opportunities. That’s why one of the major issues that should be facing urban schools is how do you integrate children economically."

The new political climate in Washington. A renewed push from City Hall to help families deal with social problems. Aggressive strategies from school headquarters to keep students in school are among the reasons for hope.

With all that in play, it may just be the right time in Baltimore to curb truancy and boost school attendance, once and for all.