Class Acts: Silver Star: A beacon leading truants back to school
Simply having a safe, comfortable and quiet place to complete school work can make a huge difference for troubled kids, giving them an alternative to sometimes-chaotic home lives and the lure of the streets.
The Silver Star Resource Center in Salinas offers a just such welcoming space. Habitual truants can take independent study classes and complete class assignments there. It’s part of a larger collaboration between the Monterey County Office of Education, local school districts, other public agencies and community groups. Together, they can offer much more then just a cozy setting where chronic school-skippers can get back on track.
Their larger effort, the Silver Star Gang Prevention and Intervention Program, connects the truants and other youths with needed educational, social and legal services. The resource center and small-school site have helped to increase school attendance and to decrease participation in gangs and criminal activity.
“We’re stair-stepping [habitual truants] back to full-time school with a modified school day and smaller class sizes,” says Crystal Beget, principal of independent students and alternative programs for the Monterey COE. “There’s a sense of physical security as well,” she adds.
Educators and criminal justice professionals have long known that the factors that lead to truancy are many and complex. They include poverty, fractured family lives, learning difficulties and poor self-esteem. And those conditions can compound kids’ problems, leading to academic failure, gang participation, drug abuse and other criminal activity.
There are roughly 4,000 cases of truancy among Monterey County’s roughly 70,000 K-12 students each year, as well as a growing juvenile gang problem. District Attorney Dean D. Flippo placed the county’s truancy problem front and center in the public eye some 20 years ago, when he began organizing meetings at school sites for parents of children identified by schools as being at-risk for chronically truant behavior. Flippo and his employees counseled parents about the dangers of truancy and began to work one-on-one with families to encourage them to make sure their children go to school.
That led to the multiagency collaborative that became the larger gang prevention and intervention program. It combines the efforts of educators, social workers, juvenile probation officers and other service providers to help stabilize families and get their kids back in school.
The Silver Star Resource Center offers a central location for the COE to work with county agencies and community-based organizations. Juvenile probation officers supervise young people who have already entered the legal system. The county’s Children’s Behavioral Health counselors provide both individual and group services to young people dealing with anxiety, depression and other emotional issues, while its Community Health Services provide a drug and alcohol program, and the Office of Employment Training pitches in with job preparation and placement. A community-based group, Partners for Peace, trains families in communication skills. Other mentoring programs, including a Latina Empowerment Program, link youths with positive role models.
As the collaborative program developed, chronically truant students expressed their need for a quiet place to do their school work. The county office of education responded with the Silver Star Program—a sort of modified independent study program in a setting conducive to learning, where students are held to strict attendance and behavior standards.
Beget, the COE administrator, says the school site and program provides kids with a close-knit community that they might not have experienced in traditional schools.
“Often, students who have a high truancy rate feel a sort of disconnect. They don’t really feel valued within the system,” Beget says. “[Silver Star] provides a very intimate setting. They begin to feel comfortable with the school and the staff services.”
Officials with the program estimate that 85 percent of students who receive truancy mediation through these collaborative efforts show improved school attendance. That success has helped to sustain Silver Star; the average daily attendance revenues collected by the COE sustain funding for the educational portion of the program, while school districts that have seen their own ADA benefit have agreed to subsidize the program’s truancy abatement component. The economic standing of most of the youths served qualifies the program for behavioral health, social service and other funding, while other grants and the county’s donation of building space also help.
And the kids themselves are the ultimate beneficiaries.
“It gives [the students] more options and hope for their educational future,” Beget says.
—Pamela Martineau