Health Care

High School Reform

Youth Ministers Project

School Attendance Center

ACT Meadowview Partnership

Sacramento ACT equips local leaders to translate their faith into action while creating innovative solutions to pressing community issues.

SCHOOL ATTENDANCE CENTER

The mission of the One Stop School Attendance Center is to improve school attendance by working with students, parents, schools and the community to ensure a faster, more effective response to truancy problems.

Regular school attendance is one of the most reliable predictors of academic achievement.   In addition to promoting educational success, truancy intervention is a strategy for preventing crime.   Keeping young people in school is an important step toward keeping them out of trouble.   Truancy is a widely regarded as a gateway to crime, because missing school is a key risk factor for future delinquency and criminal behavior.   During the day young people should be in class, not out on the streets.

One Stop School Attendance Center would give teeth to the current truancy practice used by local schools and the District.   The truancy center would be the hub in stemming youth violence and truancy in Sacramento.  

Priorities of the One Stop School Attendance Center

Early intervention means reaching students before they become chronic truants.

From our conversations and survey with many Hmong and Mien families, we have found that gang involvement begins early, and that if we do not intervene early, we often lose children to gangs before they even get to high school.   The School Attendance Center's early intervention program would conduct early intervention strategies at the 6 th and 7 th grades in which truancy will immediately trigger a home visit or parent conference with the goal of nipping the problem in the bud.  

The truancy center staff, consisting of social workers, outreach staff, and police officers, would be assigned to work with students who are not going to school and who are chronic truants in the school district.  

Truant students will be dropped off at the truancy center where assessments can be made to determine what type of services and programs the truant can enrolled into.  

Direct Services within the One Stop School Attendance Center:

-Counseling for youth/students
-Big Brother Big Sister/Mentorship
-Mandatory Gang Education program and classes for truants and their parents
-Conflict Resolution and Anger Management
-Gang awareness
-Parenting Techniques
-Peer Pressure

Learn more about our work on High School Reform, Youth Minister Project, School Attendance Center, and Gang Coalition.