This week, New York City’s students returned to school. In addition to meeting thꦅeir new teachers and getting their new textbooks, some of them will be coming face to face with a brand new policy: a Bloomberg initiative on truancy.
Here’s the deal. Students who flee the classroom will now find themselves sent to the basement of the Police Athletic building in West 🍨Harlem. That’s the site of what the city is calling its first “Engagement Center.”
The logic is that students who play hooky from school won’t be sent home, which is what they want — or back to the classroom, which is what they don’t want. Instead, they’ll be in the Engagement Center, where the city will offer one-on-one mentoring, counseling and tutoring. The hope is to give absentee students the attention and focus on learning they aren’t finding in their classrooms, or to help them address other, underlying reasons they have for ditching school.
It’s a big problem. Mayor Bloomberg notes that rough🃏ly 200,000 students missed a month or more of classes last year. That’s one out of five New York City students.
“We’ve taken the major steps in the last three years to reduce chronic absenteeism by developing innovative strategies that have proven highly effective,” says Bloomberg. “The opening of this Engagement Center is the next step in ensuring our children are provided with the support they need to stay in school and off the streets — for their safety and their academic futures.”
Give the mayor cred✱it. Whatever might be said about Bloomberg after he leaves office, it’s good to see that even in the waning days of his last term he continues to launch innovative reforms aimed at making the city’s public schools serve its students and not just its work force.