Reining in NZ's top waggers

PETER DRURY/Waikato Times

CLASS TIME: Three students wagging class at Hamilton's Fraser High School escape from SASH student attendance officer Renalda "Nellie" Kawau.

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Every Monday, staff from School Attendance Service Hamilton visit up to 60 Waikato families as they battle with the second worst truancy rate in the country.

A total of 74,000 students attended primary and secondary school in the region last year, and the absence rate was 13.6 per cent – more than 10,000 students.

The absentee rate was the second worst in the country. Only Gisborne had a higher rate.

Last week Education Minister Anne Tolley released figures which she said showed 30,000 students were truant in New Zealand on any given day and announced an extra $4 million to combat the problem.

This money will largely go towards giving schools more access to electronic attendance registers that will identify truancy trends developing with particular students, and more widespread use of an early notification text system, which is already in place in some Hamilton schools.

Helen Te Kiri, assistant principal at Peachgrove Intermediate, said truancy was a continuing problem at the school but the text message truancy alert system, and electronic attendance registers had been very effective.

Melville High School is another school to recently implement electronic attendance registers and text message truancy warnings, and principal Clive Hamill has been encouraged by its early success.

"Eighty per cent of success at school is students actually being here," he said.

School Attendance Service Hamilton (SASH), which employs four staff, operates out of Hamilton's Fraser High School with an annual budget of $120,000. It has contracts with 70 schools.

Manager Jim Church said Monday was SASH's busiest day. Up to 60 mainly primary school-related visits were made by the four officers to attend.

Mr Church said the visits were usually positive. As a result, school attendance officers were able to discuss with parents or caregivers factors the reasons for absences, which could range from sickness, lack of proper food and school uniform, to extended breaks due to a tangi.

"Most whanau give us a good reception. I don't think there's many whanau members that do not want their kids to do well at school," he said. "Everything has to be right for a kid to get back to school.

"If one part is not working, then they will not be back at school, simple as that."

The Waikato Times watched Mr Church and fellow school attendance officer Renalda "Nellie" Kawau on a brief sweep around Nawton this week.

One junior student, wandering late to school with a flimsy excuse of being sick, was let off but would be checked on later, while three young women were flushed out of a school's far corner after wagging second period.

Mr Church indicated it was easy to look at statistics and say the problem was getting worse, without knowing about the important progress his team was making at the ground level.

"The hard thing is proving we're making a difference," he said. "If you look at the statistics, you'll say we are not doing our job, with more absent students now than two years ago."

Mr Church said school attendance officers may not always be successful with individual students but the flow-on affect within families was crucial and could not be measured.

"It may not work for the kid you're working with, but the one or two down from them, well how do you measure that?"

SASH deals with high school students but they are a lower priority.

"Once they reach 15, they've decided whether they want to be in school or not."

Project Rock On, a truancy programme set up by Hamilton police in 2003, takes up the reins at this point.

Hamilton's Fraser High School deputy principal Gordon Crocker, who facilitates the SASH programme at Fraser, describes its budget as "margarine spread pretty thinly", but said they do a great job throughout the city.

"SASH plays a vital role for our school," he said.

The programme has had a "99 per cent strike rate" in bringing in students in recent years, and later their parents, to talk to a dean about continued absences.

- © Fairfax NZ News