New effort in Kansas City aims to get dropouts back to class

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- The name on Larry Jones' clipboard belonged to a 10th-grader who was missing too much school.

He might be here.

Jones stood with Rosalyn Robinson on a buckled sidewalk near Linwood Boulevard and Jackson Avenue, peering up the narrow stone steps to a house that looked as though its entryway had been beaten. The doorknob dangled limply. A dog barked somewhere near.

"Where's the dog?" Robinson said.

As case managers for the Kansas City School District, Jones and Robinson are on the front edge of the district's intensified efforts -- with new help from NAACP volunteers -- to track down dropouts and get them back in school.

They find families under stress. Some have left no trace but legal notices for past-due rent. Some parents or guardians don't know where their teenager has gone.

This school year, the district has tried to track more than 1,750 students who either dropped out or did not enter school at the start of the year. The district recruited more than 300 students back into school and is still looking for about 1,000 students. Most of the rest have moved or left for other schools.

What's peculiar to Michelle Metje, the district's director of transition services, is that most students don't think they've dropped out. It's not as if they made any such decision.

"They say they just weren't going to class," Metje said.

She read from a checklist used to record why a student dropped out: Problems with physical fitness, disabilities, mental illness, parental influence, economic reasons, pregnancy.

"There are ways to help with all of these," she said.

The district's nine truancy officers and 13 case managers talk to families about solutions to get students back in school.

They make up ground: Since early January, the district has accounted for 273 students on the dropout or did-not-enter-school list.

And they lose ground: In that same time, 237 dropouts were added to their list.

Finding dropouts isn't easy, not for the case managers in the field or for community volunteers making phone calls from a district calling center.

"Don't get discouraged," Ed Marquez, director of pupil services, told members of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People who have been meeting regularly to call families of dropout students.

"You will get many disconnected numbers. Those who tend to withdraw from school are the ones who will be harder to find. That's why the more we do this, the tighter the grip we're going to get on it."

Previously, the volunteers called on 112 cases and talked to someone in 51 of them.

"And that's success," Marquez said.

It helps when someone who's not a district worker calls on families, said the NAACP's Rosa James. The person on the line is a neighbor who wants to help.

"You're always hearing how kids don't think anybody cares," she said.

One of their connections found Sterlin Johnson.

Winter was coming and Johnson, a 19-year-old Southeast High School senior last fall, needed clothes.

"I needed money," he said.

He felt stress at home. His mother was having trouble keeping up with bills.

He still had plans to get some business education and start his own barbershop someday.

But he figured he could move out of the house, move in with a roommate, find a job and still get to school.

His job at a discount store paid $6.80 an hour. He worked 35 hours a week, and he frequently had to ask co-workers to swap shifts to make class. Soon, he let classes slip.

"It's hard to balance work and school," he said, holding out his hands like a set of scales. "You've got to pay bills. What's more important? At that point, I was thinking it was work."

In January, a volunteer called Johnson's grandmother. The district had options for her grandson, the caller said. Johnson said his grandmother told him about the 21st Century credit recovery program with the Full Employment Council that would enable him to graduate this May.

He would have to quit his job and look for a new one compatible with school. He might need to move back in with his mother.

Jones the case manager wasn't sure what Johnson decided. So he and Robinson made a side trip to the Full Employment Council.

"Oh, yes, he's enrolled," the director of the 21st Century program said. "He's in the class."

As Johnson would explain later, with his hands back out as scales, "School came to be more important."

At the house with the broken doorknob, no one was home but the dog. It howled at Jones and Robinson from behind a padlocked accordion grate stretched across a broken garage door. They left a note wedged in a hole in the door.

At another home, grandparents were there, but not their 18-year-old grandson, who'd said he'd be there.

"He's house jumping," the woman said. "I think I know where he is, but I don't know the address."

Jones thought the student had agreed to enter a state credit recovery program, but now he had stood up Jones and left his grandparents to try to explain. Not a good sign.

The grandfather sat with his elbows on his knees.

"He'd have trouble in math and I'd tell him, 'Bring your homework home. I'll help you with it,"' he said. "Then I call the school, and they say he's seldom seen."

Jones left a card with his cell phone number.

"I need to get some face time with him," Jones said.

Behind an apartment door, they found one student they were looking for -- Chanelle Owens, 18 -- and another who wasn't on anyone's list anymore, Michael Williams, 19.

It was Williams who opened the door, facing strangers, and asked, "Are you the police?"

Owens, standing inside the sparse apartment, was expecting Jones and Robinson. She said she was ready to fill out paperwork, finish her credits and maybe go to community college.

"A family therapist or something?" she said, pondering her shapeless plans.

Williams, somewhat perplexed, said to Owens, "You're going back?"

But when the case managers left, they had Williams' contact information.

"Some folks give up on kids like these," Jones said later.

He had one last visit to make, to the district's teenage parent center. He wanted to make sure another of his students was indeed at the school.

He waited at a table just inside the front door while the principal sent for her. She came softly down the corridor and only nodded shyly when he smiled and said, "I'm glad to see you here."

He watched her drift back to class, staying until he heard the heavy door click.

"To me, they are the future," he said. "They don't see hope, but we see hope for them."