A student says the city's anti-truancy push changed her life

As the new kid at the High School of Teaching and The Professions in the Bronx two years ago, Jean Robinson awoke each morning filled with dread and anxiety about going to school.

“You know, everybody has their own different cliques and I wasn’t really fitting in with any of them,” Robinson said.

A sophomore transfer, Robinson missed her old friends and began skipping school. Over the course of the 2009-2010 school year, she missed more than a month of school and, with each passing day, knew a high school diploma was further and further out of reach.

“I thought about it every day, but I just felt like I needed that extra push,” Robinson said. “I didn’t have that at the time.”

Robinson’s paltry attendance rate caught the eyes of city officials, who at the same time were launching a citywide push to raise attendance rates among students who were absent most often. They paired Robinson with a mentor who monitored her attendance and made sure she was showing up to school.

With the help from her mentor, a school guidance counselor, Robinson last year reduced her absence rate by more than 50 percent, missing just 10 days of school.

Robinson’s turnaround was touted by Mayor Bloomberg as a success story of the year-old attendance initiative called “Every Student, Every Day,” which, in addition to mentors, included letters home to parents and celebrity wake-up calls. As a result of the first year’s success, Bloomberg announced Wednesday that the city was more than doubling the initiative’s scope, from 25 schools to 50 schools with more than 4,000 students.“The gains that our mentors have made within just one year prove that we’re certainly on the right track and show that this is a problem that can be overcome or at least ameliorated,” Bloomberg said at a press conference at High School of Teaching and The Professions to announce the program’s expansion.

Robinson was one of 450 students – out of 1,450 targeted – to improve their attendance rate by an average of 16 days, according to results of a study conducted by a multiagency task force formed in conjunction with the “Every Student, Every Day” program. The study compared attendance rates of students who missed at least one month of school — and were chronically absent — or at least two months of school, putting them into the “severely absent” category.

Overall data from the study showed that students who were paired with mentors were generally more likely to go to school than those without, with high schoolers being the most likely to improve attendance with a mentor’s help.

Attendance rates for middle school students were least responsive. Once paired with mentors, students who had missed more than two months of school in the past actually showed up to school about 6 percent less often than those who did not have a mentor, a result that officials said they would study further.

A new coalition of 300 volunteer mentors from non-profit agencies, such as City Year, the Children’s Aid Society, and Citizen Schools, will enter schools to work with the chronically absent students. At other schools, trained school staff, such as school aides and guidance counselors, will also mentor students.

The program’s cost, an estimated $250,000, will come mostly from private donations from Macy’s, officials said.

The task force and program was created in response to a 2009 report that found that one in five students in the city’s school system missed at least 30 days of school per year, a statistic that is correlated with increased likeliness of dropping out.

“Truancy is often the first step in the wrong direction, because the more school a child misses during the early grades, the more unlikely it will be for him or her to succeed in the higher grades,” Bloomberg said.

The expanded initiative will also target students who are most likely to miss school, even if they have not already been chronically absent. Students returning from long suspensions or time spent in a juvenile justice facility and students in foster care will get special attention, as will students in “high-risk transition grades” – first, sixth and ninth grades.

Robinson, who is now a senior, said that before she started working with her mentor, no one had ever bothered to tell her had to go to school.

“I just feel like I needed that extra push, somebody to get me out the door and say, ‘Hey, you’re going to school,'” Robinson said.