Talking tough to New York's truants

"He keeps running round the house, singing 'I want to be a gangster' - wears anything he likes, dressed like a bum. I have done everything in my power to speak to him."

Pierre Caesar is an angry father, getting a few things off his chest.

He is standing in front of a New York police sergeant, a social worker employed by the District Attorney's office, a child services administrator and a school board official. They all work together at one of Brooklyn's 'Track' centres - an acronym for Truancy Reduction Alliance to Contact Kids.

Pierre's 14-year-old son is what this collaborative effort is all about.

He stands by impassively - sometimes smirking - while his exasperated father discusses ways of preventing him from being picked up by police again, when he should be at high school.

"I did mean to go the school but I was just late. I could have been learning all this time, but instead I was just sitting here losing education, in a solitary room," the boy tells me defensively.

He is embarrassed, and says that he would not want to come back to this truancy centre. It is clear that a lot of talking will be done at home later on.

The multi-agency initiative established in Brooklyn in the mid-90s by District Attorney Charles Hynes, was extended to the whole of New York City exactly a year ago.

Combatting crime

While an initiative was announced last week to station police officers in English schools for the first time as part of combating the crime problems associated with truancy, in New York, the NYPD have been heavily involved for years.

But it was only when the Track scheme was launched, that officers felt a real difference was being made, explains Sergeant Ray Miles. He runs the police side of the operation in the Brooklyn precinct centre I visited.

"Before, you'd bring them back to school and a lot of times there weren't any other services available to the child, the recidivist rate was high.

"Now you have checks and balances. A social worker, a representative from the Board of Education, and they delve deeper into what the problems might be," he explains.

There are 1.2 million children in New York's schools and they must attend from the age of six to 17.

Every school day, about 10% of them are absent from the classroom - not all playing truant of course.

Children in class

There are no specific figures available for the numbers who are, but the school board's Director of Attendance, Lilian Garelick, says the key indicator is that 1.5% more children are in class now, compared to this time last year.

The Track centre I visited is housed on school-day mornings inside the non-denominational Church of the Open Door. The sparsely furnished facility is loaned free to the community.

Running costs are kept low, and shared between the agencies involved. The mayor's office has now taken on overall responsibility for funding.

Tough love

According to the man who runs the centre day to day, Joe Brown, the initiative's strength is its 'tough love' principle.

Only about 4% of the 13,000 students who have been brought to the centres around the city so far this year will make a second visit.

"The goal is to make it very uncomfortable for them. We don't want to see them again. Most of the time we don't," he says.

The parents' involvement is crucial, but a lot of the time they are also part of the problem: "A lot of these kids are pretty much raising themselves. They live in drug-infested homes - a lot of bad things are going on in their environments," he adds.

So the scheme is focused on truancy prevention over punishment, and attempts to tackle the causes of choosing a life of marginal criminality on the streets.

What is unclear, is how to reach that significant minority of children with no parental or guardian support, who simply do not want to be in a classroom.