How D.C.'s failure to curb truancy fueled a surge in youth crime

Washington Post

3 days ago

How the District's failure to curb truancy in middle schools yielded the biggest youth crime surge in a generation.
As the first bell rang at Brookland Middle School on April 3, 2024, Irving LaBoard's desk sat empty. An hour earlier, police had found his body in Fort Dupont Park. He had been shot and killed.
Irving was 14, an eighth-grader. Growing up, he was a strong reader who loved tossing footballs, playing the piano and analyzing the deeper meaning of Marvel movies. But in the last year of his life, Irving was detained in Maryland after being accused of stealing cars, then arrested and charged in the District with theft and unauthorized use of a vehicle.
Weeks before his death, Nadine Younger, Irving's great-aunt, had been looking for any clue that could help explain what had gone wrong with him. She found a letter from his middle school, dated Feb. 1, that said Irving had missed 47 days of class — half the school year.
'How can you miss all those days?' she recalled thinking.
Irving was one of nearly 16,000 D.C. Public Schools students — one-third of its K-12 enrollment — who were truant that school year, meaning they missed at least two weeks of classes without an excuse. For more than a decade, District leaders have linked school attendance to youth crime, saying tackling one will curb the other.
But a Washington Post investigation found that the D.C. Council and Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) have failed to follow through on key initiatives that promised to keep students in class and out of trouble.
Irving LaBoard, 14, was found fatally shot on April 3, 2024, in Fort Dupont Park. (Family photo) Nadine Younger, Irving's great-aunt, found a Feb. 1 letter from his middle school that said he had missed 47 days of class, or half the school year at that point. (Michael A. McCoy/For The Washington Post)
The District's child welfare agency has largely abandoned the early-warning system that city leaders set up more than a decade ago to find absent students and help return them to the classroom. More than 18,000 reports of truancy went uninvestigated in the last three full school years, The Post found.
'We're just basically reporting into a vacuum,' said Cory Chapman, a math and special education teacher at MacFarland Middle School. More than 40 percent of the approximate 570 students at the Petworth neighborhood school were truant in 2023-2024, the most recently completed school year. 'We saw something, we said something.'
Meanwhile, the number of DCPS students who missed at least two weeks of class in a school year increased 110 percent over the past decade, according to a Post analysis.
In the District and across the nation, high-schoolers have the highest rates of absenteeism. Still, a Post analysis found that D.C.'s truancy problem has been growing the fastest among middle school students, an age group that helped drive the city's spike in carjacking and other serious crimes in 2023. Last school year, 30 percent of middle-schoolers — or five times more students than a decade ago — were truant.
City leaders blamed the coronavirus pandemic for an uptick in unexcused absences, as well as the rise in youth crime. However, The Post found that the truancy rate began rising for DCPS middle-schoolers before the pandemic, from 10 percent in the 2014-2015 school year to more than 30 percent in 2018-2019 and one-third last year.
Truancy rates increased most drastically in the historically underserved, Black neighborhoods east of the Anacostia River. Last school year, more than 20 percent of Sousa Middle School's 268 students missed at least a month's worth of class.
'When you ask the child [why they missed school], the child will shrug their shoulders,' said a Sousa teacher, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution from the school district. 'It continues to happen because there's no consequences.'
The D.C. Council passed anti-truancy laws intended to address youth violence after a series of shootings in 2010 left five young people dead. The legislation established a process to identify at-risk students before they ended up in the court system, and directed the mayor to create a plan to staff schools with mental health specialists.
Additionally, DCPS leadership set goals to ensure every campus had enough extracurricular programs to keep students engaged.
The Post found that these initiatives fell apart in the years before the 2023 youth crime spike — the very scenario they were designed to prevent. That year, D.C. police made more than 500 arrests of people under age 18 on robbery charges, which include carjackings. This marked the highest one-year total for such arrests since the 1990s, according to police reports.
DCPS — which serves 52,000 students at 117 schools, including 24 with middle school students — answers directly to city leaders and, ultimately, Bowser. In 2007, amid scrutiny about test scores and graduation rates, the council and U.S. Congress both approved legislation that took control of the school system from the city's school board and gave it to the mayor.
Bowser, who was elected to the city's top post in 2014, declined multiple requests to be interviewed for this story. She did not respond to written questions from reporters.
Phil Mendelson (D), chairman of the D.C. Council since 2012 and a council member for nearly three decades, pinned the responsibility on government agencies. He said it was not the council's job to enforce the laws it passed.
'The laws that we have in place have the right framework — identify kids, identify their needs and then address their needs,' Mendelson said in an interview. 'It's clear to me that the persistent problems with absenteeism are a result of poor-quality implementation, not of something missing in the law.'
Council member Zachary Parker (D-Ward 5), a former middle school teacher elected to office in 2022, criticized both his colleagues and Bowser for what he described as a bureaucratic blame game that too often leaves students behind.
'On this mayor's side, there is low performance, and bad performance has been allowed for many years,' Parker said in an interview. 'On the council side, there's been not-so-great oversight, or at least not oversight that's leading to change. And our schools and our young people are the ones that have paid the price here.'
In recent years, both the D.C. Council and the mayor's office have taken steps to reduce chronic absenteeism. Last fall, education officials signed onto a national pledge to cut the school system's 2022-2023 truancy rate in half over the next two years. The rate of truant DCPS students ticked down the next school year, from 35 to 33 percent.
The Bowser administration has spent more than $30 million over the past five years on a safety program that stations adults around campuses in high-crime areas, and recently expanded the effort to include a bus service for about 300 students who would otherwise feel unsafe getting to school. Schools have introduced tutoring and vocational programs, as well as a messaging system that reminds at-risk students to come to class.
DCPS leadership also started a program called the Sixth Grade Academy, designed to ease the transition to middle school, which data showed decreased chronic absenteeism last year at nine of the 11 schools that participated.
'We have a plan and we're working the plan,' said Paul Kihn, the deputy mayor for education. 'It's not the case that everything is broken in this system. It is the case we have to reinvent some of what we're doing.'
The reasons for truancy are varied and complex, and the vast majority of students who miss school do not commit crimes. They help to raise young siblings at home or take care of sick parents. Some don't have clean clothes.
Still, most young people who wind up in D.C.'s court system have a history of poor school attendance. A study by the District's Criminal Justice Coordinating Council reported that children who were arrested between June 2019 and July 2020 had missed an average of 46 days, including 39 unexcused absences.
D.C.'s juvenile justice pipeline
This series examines the District's juvenile justice system, a constellation of agencies tasked with preventing children and teens from becoming caught up in crime and rehabilitating those who have violated the law. Click on the tabs to learn more about key parts of the system, including public schools, the police and the youth detention facility, which are overseen by Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D).
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Nearly 16,000 students truant in 2023-2024 school year
District leaders have found that juveniles who are arrested have a history of missing class. D.C. public schools, led by Chancellor Lewis D. Ferebee, are supposed to engage children with after-school programs, provide mental health specialists to students and investigate why youths are missing class. Truant students can be referred to child welfare or the courts.
Judge Darlene Soltys, who presides over the District's family court division, told The Post that 'almost all' young people who are brought before her on charges have a history of being truant.
The chief juvenile judge said some of the children fear for their safety, or are embarrassed by how far behind they have fallen in class. Some children give her another reason, Soltys said: 'They are aware that there's a lack of enforcement of truancy issues with the school or in the city.'
Some youth advocates criticized District leadership for choosing to create new programs rather than address fundamental issues with existing truancy protocols. Others argued that the D.C. Council and mayor became invested in school attendance after headlines about youth violence — and worry they will lose that focus as crime rates fall from their 2023 peak. Last year, police arrested 80 juveniles suspected of carjacking, down from 110 the year before.
Katrina Owens, the executive director of DC SCORES, a soccer, poetry and community service program operating in 68 DCPS and charter schools, said she believes that the District's leaders are at an inflection point: They can demonstrate their commitment to fixing long-standing issues with truancy before another violent cycle begins.
'We need to invest in our young people,' Owens said. 'If we don't, you will see an uptick in violence and kids getting involved in things.'
A decade of discord
In March 2010, a group of young people were gathering after a funeral in Southeast Washington when bullets flew out the windows of a passing vehicle. Three died and six were wounded in the drive-by, the culmination of a week of violence between two crews that became known as the South Capitol Street shootings.
The attacks largely involved teenagers. The youngest victim was 16; the oldest was 20. Of the five young men convicted in the case in 2012, three committed other crimes as juveniles. Four had histories of missing school, as did 18 percent of DCPS students at the time.
The shootings highlighted for city leaders the link between absenteeism and crime.
'Had their truancy been used to identify them as being at risk and had they received services and interventions earlier on, their actions in March 2010 may have been avoided,' Mendelson wrote of the killers in a 2013 committee report.
Cathy L. Lanier, then the D.C. police chief, puts her hand on the back of Nardyne Jefferies, whose 16-year-old daughter, Brishell Jones, was killed in the South Capitol Street shootings in 2010. (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)
The D.C. Council passed the Attendance Accountability Amendment Act of 2013, which created a protocol to identify troubled students before they racked up a mountain of absences. The system, though, quickly began to collapse. Officials investigated just 5 percent of truancy referrals over the past three school years, according to data from the city's child welfare agency.
Here's how the law was supposed to work:
The District would address truancy among high school students separately from elementary and middle school students, recognizing that younger students more often rely on their parents to get to school.
High school staff were required to alert the courts when students missed 15 days of school without an excuse. Elementary and middle school staffers were told to call a hotline to report students younger than 14 who missed 10 days of school to the Child and Family Services Agency for possible 'educational neglect' by their parents or guardians.
The agency would contact families, investigate why the child wasn't attending class and dispatch social workers to provide support that would help them get back on track. They might separate the student from a family if severe abuse was discovered.
At the time, leaders at the child welfare agency supported the law and thought it was worthwhile to try an approach that could help families avoid the judicial system, according to Brenda Donald, who was running the agency when the act was passed.
'We were eager to help the little ones,' Donald told The Post.
Their willingness did not last long. When David Grosso (I-At Large) became head of the council's education committee in 2015, child welfare staff told him that parents were skeptical about cooperating with an agency that had the power to pry their children from them, he said in an interview with The Post.
'It's like the police showing up,' Grosso, who left the council in 2021, recalled employees telling him.
In most cases, the child welfare workers said, they found that students were missing school for minor reasons, such as a parent forgetting to send a doctor's note or a student needing clean uniforms.
Tanya Torres Trice, a longtime child welfare staffer who is the agency's interim director, told The Post that the requirement to investigate every case spread the agency's staff thin.
'Doing that takes away from investigating actual abuse and allegations,' she said. 'The child welfare agency is not the answer.'
By the end of the 2014-2015 school year, the agency was rejecting about three-quarters of educational neglect cases referred from the hotline.
As the agency accepted fewer cases, it shifted responsibility to investigate most truancy cases back to the schools.
Instead of contacting families for an investigation, child welfare workers began asking school staff to explore all potential reasons the student had missed class, according to Joseph Osiecki, supervisor of the agency's Educational Neglect Triage Unit. They would often tell school workers to connect families with neighborhood organizations — not the child welfare agency — if they needed help procuring uniforms and getting access to therapy, mentorship or parenting classes.
By 2023, when juvenile violence was at its peak, the agency was rejecting 95 percent of the educational neglect cases that came into the hotline.
In interviews with The Post, teachers and school staff said they found themselves overwhelmed by the additional tasks that came with the child welfare agency's new approach. They began taking longer to refer families.
By the 2023-2024 school year, The Post found, school staff was referring families after students had accumulated an average of 16 unexcused absences, not the required 10.
School leaders blamed the child welfare agency for the delays.
'If you're asked to run the first leg of the marathon in the relay race, and you run really hard and then there's nobody to pass the baton to, over time you're not going to run as fast or as hard,' Lewis D. Ferebee, who became DCPS chancellor in 2019, said to The Post.
The D.C. Council opted not to amend the referral process, even as its flaws were made clear. In 2014, the child welfare agency was criticized for taking six days after a school staffer's referral to look into the case of Relisha Rudd, an 8-year-old girl who went missing from a D.C. homeless shelter. She has not been found.
Young people participate in a remembrance ceremony in February 2016 for Relisha Rudd, an 8-year-old who went missing from a D.C. homeless shelter two years earlier. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)
In 2015, D.C. school officials submitted a report to the council explaining that staff felt 'buried in paperwork' required by the attendance law.
By 2023, DCPS had hired full-time attendance counselors at 69 schools to assess more quickly why students were missing school, but it was 'clearly not enough because of the volume,' Kihn, the deputy mayor for education, testified during a council hearing.
In her interview with The Post, Trice defended the child welfare agency's approach as more precise than the original protocol and sensitive to families' hesitance to work with the agency. She also said that truant students were often already being helped through other social service programs in the District.
That is not always the case, according to Marie Cohen, a former member of D.C.'s Child Fatality Review Committee. Too often, Cohen said, children's issues were found too late.
'I saw example after example of young people who died, many of those of gun violence as teenagers, whose families had been the subject of multiple calls to the [child welfare] hotline over many years,' Cohen said about her years reviewing reports of suspected neglect cases. 'Many of those calls were screened out, especially about educational neglect.
'I think this is totally wrong.'
After-school for some
In 2013, as the D.C. Council was rolling out the early-warning system, Kaya Henderson — then the DCPS chancellor — wanted to hear from the children themselves. She invited about a dozen District students to chat with her over breakfast at an IHOP.
'You are the most truant kids in the building,' Henderson recalled saying in an interview with The Post. 'What's up with that?'
The answer, she recalled, was 'school was wack.'
They attended public schools in Southeast Washington, predominantly Black campuses drawing from poor neighborhoods. At some of these schools, there were no art or music programs, no cheerleading, and no yearbook.
For decades, research from all corners of the country has consistently shown that quality after-school programs improve school attendance.
After hearing from the students, Henderson told her staff that she wanted all of the school system's campuses to have at least 30 quality extracurricular programs within three years. In 2014, she secured more than $5 million from the council to put toward a 'fun fund' for these programs.
Kaya Henderson, then the D.C. Public Schools chancellor, visits a sixth-grade class at Sousa Middle School in Southeast Washington on the first day of school in 2014. (Amanda Voisard/For The Washington Post)
Middle schools, which had the fewest activities, would be key to the success, she said.
When Henderson left the job in 2016, her post-breakfast goals for programming went with her. A Post analysis found that the council and school leaders have inconsistently funded after-school programming in District middle schools, furthering inequities they once tried to eliminate.
Today, Henderson's goal of 30 programs has been realized at three middle schools — two campuses in the District's wealthiest, Whitest neighborhoods and a third in a rapidly gentrifying area.
The median number of after-school programs available at DCPS's middle school campuses over the past school year was 23. And middle schools with fewer than 23 programs had average truancy rates that were twice as high as those with more programs, The Post found.
At Alice Deal Middle School, a campus in Tenleytown in Northwest, its 1,460 students can choose from 41 clubs, including screenwriting, Scrabble and Harry Potter. Last school year, Deal's truancy rate was 7 percent.
In the Lincoln Heights neighborhood of Northeast, Kelly Miller Middle School has nine programs for roughly 300 students, most of whom are Black. More than half the student body — 53 percent — was truant last school year.
Ferebee, the school system's current chancellor, has publicly acknowledged the lack of extracurricular programs in many of the system's middle schools. In 2023, Ferebee devised a plan of his own to expand access: He would double the number of spots available for students in those grades.
That year, Bowser pledged to build 'the most robust free before- and after-school programs in the nation,' and her administration touted a vision of providing 'Afterschool for All.'
Two years later, Ferebee said he is unsure if any middle schools have launched new programs. The work is 'ongoing,' he said, and schools are trying to 'maximize participation' with the resources they already have.
Brookland Middle School
Brookland Middle School is an example of how enrollment can influence after-school programming and how that programming can help curb truancy.
By the end of the 2017-2018 school year, almost half of Brookland's 238 students were truant. Over the next seven years, the school's enrollment grew by 60 percent as officials recruited new families. Test scores improved. The school's budget nearly doubled to $8 million. Brookland added seven afterschool programs, including archery and theater, making it one of three middle schools with 30 or more offerings.
It is now one of three middle schools to offer more than 30 after-school programs, including archery and podcasting. Last year its truancy rate was 4 percent — the lowest among middle schools.
But the story of Irving LaBoard, the Brookland eighth-grader who was killed last year, shows that even at schools with high attendance rates, students who miss weeks of class can still fall through the cracks.
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In the meantime, the chancellor said, he is researching which kinds of new programs students would want. In December, he told The Post that he had held a focus group with middle-schoolers.
'Many of the students felt like, if you were an athlete, you had something to do,' he said about the current options — most of which are sports. 'But what about all the other students who have different areas of interest?'
The disparities in extracurricular offerings stem from funding decisions by the D.C. Council and DCPS.
DCPS sets school budgets using a formula that relies heavily on student enrollment. Schools in affluent parts of the city typically attract more students, and more money as a result, meaning they can prioritize extracurricular programs. Schools with wealthier families also tend to have more active parent-teacher organizations that can organize fundraisers to support even more programming.
Thousands of children, especially in less affluent parts of D.C., rely on a separate bucket of funding the council provides for grants that are awarded by the deputy mayor for education, Kihn. He oversees the Office of Out of School Time Grants and Youth Outcomes, the city's largest source of public after-school and summer program grant funding. The office supports dozens of nonprofit organizations that spread after-school activities more evenly across the city, including dance, theater, coding and robotics.
Paul Kihn, the deputy mayor for education, speaks during a D.C. Council hearing on chronic absenteeism in November. (Shedrick Pelt/For The Washington Post)
Kihn and his staff decide how to distribute those dollars across the nonprofits, which run after-school and summertime activities on or near school grounds. The grants office disbursed $27 million last fiscal year, a figure that has increased since its founding in 2018.
But nonprofit leaders said they struggle with inconsistent funding from the deputy mayor's office from one year to the next.
A Post analysis of grants reported by the city office also found swings in the amount of money given to dozens of programs.
For example, of 128 programs that received funding from the office in fiscal 2023, 54 percent had their budgets cut in 2024. At least 30 programs lost their funding completely. The previous year, 64 percent of those same programs had seen a budget increase.
This puts the nonprofit operators in an annual dilemma, as they regularly face the prospect of firing staff, eliminating spots for children or diluting their mission, a dozen providers said in interviews. They told The Post that the inconsistent funding makes it difficult to consider expanding programs into more schools and harder to craft activities that will continue to entice students.
The number of spots for students enrolled in these grant-funded programs fell from 34,753 in 2019 to 14,629 in 2023, according to data the office published in its annual reports.
Last fiscal year, the grants office started using a new system that requires providers to report enrollment and attendance on a weekly basis. Officials reported they had served 17,475 students.
'We anticipate when we do our yearly budget that we'll at least be matched. [If not,] it throws a wrench in our budget,' said Audrey Walker, director of youth services at Jubilee Housing, an affordable housing nonprofit that hosts after-school programs for residents.
In fiscal 2023, Jubilee Housing's grant grew 5 percent from the previous year. After dropping by 6 percent the next year, the nonprofit had to scrap plans to hire a sign language instructor. Now, it's considering charging families for a summer field trip it usually offers free.
'It's frustrating, not because we're not grateful,' Walker said. 'It's frustrating because we are striving for high-quality programming and creating a love to learn for our youth. And that includes ramping up our efforts.'
'It's on us to make sure schools are places kids want to be. We clearly haven't done it.'
— D.C. Council member Matthew Frumin (D-Ward 3)
Asked about the impact of funding fluctuations on programs and enrollment, Kihn told The Post that his office was making it a priority to give grants to a larger number of nonprofits.
In fiscal 2018, the office awarded grants to 89 nonprofits to run programs for District students. In 2024, it awarded grants to 150. That approach, he said, provides families with more options.
'You've got some individual providers that are suggesting they had their own individual budget cut and that that somehow is bad,' Kihn said. 'And I just, I would, in a very respectful way, encourage you to reframe that a little bit, because let's say you have two programs, and they each get $100, versus five programs where they're each getting $80. What's better for the city?'
Kihn's office disputed the enrollment data it published in its own annual reports. Pamela Goldsmith, a spokesperson for the deputy mayor, described the 2019 figure as an 'estimate,' acknowledging that some students were counted multiple times. Goldsmith could not say how program attendance had changed over time.
A year after the grants office began promoting Bowser's vision of delivering 'Afterschool for All,' its disbursements fell from $28 million to $27 million. Officials said the decision came as the deputy mayor's office ran out of federal aid it started receiving during the pandemic.
The D.C. Policy Center, a local think tank, estimates that about 3 in 5 children between prekindergarten and eighth grade do not have access to a spot in any afterschool program.
D.C. Council member Matthew Frumin (D-Ward 3) introduced a bill in December 2023 that would increase the number of publicly funded after-school seats by 10 percent each year until every student has access to these programs.
The council has not yet scheduled a vote on Frumin's bill, which he reintroduced in January.
'It's on us to make sure schools are places kids want to be,' he said in an interview. 'We clearly haven't done it.'
A promise unfulfilled
District leaders have pledged for years to put teams of mental health experts in schools to combat truancy, but The Post found that since 2020, an increasing number of those jobs have gone unfilled.
In 2012, the D.C. Council passed a law that gave the mayor one year to come up with a plan to expand behavioral health services to all students by 2017. The council, alluding to the shooting two years earlier on South Capitol Street, noted that the city's 'deferred investment in youth behavioral health created the conditions that made [such] tragedies' possible.
Research backed up the effort: Making counselors, social workers and psychologists available to students has been found to help them overcome obstacles to attendance, according to experts at Attendance Works, a national nonprofit focused on reducing absenteeism.
In 2017, two years after Bowser became mayor — and four years after the council's original deadline — she unveiled a plan to expand these kinds of positions in District schools. At the time, only 47 DCPS campuses, or about 4 in 10, had partnerships with the Department of Behavioral Health to provide mental health and early intervention services through behavioral technicians, council reports show.
Bowser's plan called for putting a technician in every school, and having them work with social workers and psychologists already deployed at most schools. Officials at the schools would determine how many of each specialist they needed, based on enrollment, truancy rates and the number of economically disadvantaged students.
The District allocated funding for these positions, but keeping the jobs filled has been a growing challenge, The Post found. By the end of the 2023-2024 school year, 42 percent of DCPS campuses were not fully staffed with the mental health professionals that city leaders said they needed.
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The gaps have gotten worse over time, with more schools grappling with more openings each year. During the 2020-2021 school year, 22 campuses each had one vacant behavioral support position. By the 2023-2024 school year, 46 schools had 79 vacancies.
Some schools with significant truancy problems have struggled to recruit and retain these key staff members year after year. Every school year since 2017-2018, MacFarland Middle — the Petworth school where 4 in 10 students were truant last school year — has operated with at least one of the positions unfilled.
In 2018-2019, the school had no psychologist. In 2021-2022, it was short a counselor. Over the past two school years, one of the two social worker positions at MacFarland was unfilled for a stretch of at least seven months — twice.
Chapman, the MacFarland math teacher, said having more staff focused on students' behavior would benefit the school.
'It would just allow them to help more students who have a need,' he said. 'That's the biggest thing right now: There's not enough to go around.'
Kihn said part-time staffers sometimes fill in when behavioral health positions are left open. 'The vacancy does not equal lack of service,' he said.
The deputy mayor said there has been a shortage of qualified people applying for these roles. In 2023, the city offered hiring bonuses to attract stronger candidates, as well as retention bonuses to keep existing staff.
During budget hearings in 2024, mental health advocates unsuccessfully pushed the council to invest millions of additional dollars to boost recruitment efforts and raise salaries, which are well below what psychologists and other specialists can make outside the school district. Council member Christina Henderson (I-At Large) told The Post she was not convinced that she and her colleagues could solve the problem.
'I don't know if this is a particular phenomenon from the pandemic or just kind of where we are as a society in general, but if you are a mental health clinician, you can make more money in private practice working from your home office without ever taking insurance,' said Henderson, who joined the council in 2021. 'So where do we find the people?'
When the District has made mental health staffing at high-need schools a priority, data shows, students have benefited.
One example is Kramer Middle School in Anacostia. In the 2021-2022 school year, 93 percent of the 272 students missed at least two weeks of school — the highest truancy rate among middle schools in the District.
The next school year, officials added three more social workers from the Department of Human Services to assist the behavioral health experts working there. Absenteeism declined. By the 2023-2024 school year, the truancy rate at Kramer had dropped to 56 percent.
A mural hangs in the entrance of Kramer Middle School in Southeast Washington in November. (Shedrick Pelt/For The Washington Post)
Students are served lunch during a Thanksgiving event last year at Kramer Middle School, where the truancy rate has fallen by roughly half in recent years. (Shedrick Pelt/For The Washington Post)
The school still has one of the District's highest rates of students missing class. Gerice Williams, the lead case manager from the Department of Human Services, said she is certain that attendance will continue to improve as her team works to make Kramer as inviting to students as possible. She decorated Room 17, the team's home base, with cobwebs on Halloween and pink ribbons for Breast Cancer Awareness Month.
She visited parents and provided clothes and hygiene products for students in a pinch. Because students often skipped classes on Fridays, Williams had fancy breakfasts catered at the school at the end of the week.
'Hi, Miss Williams,' said Ayden, a soft-spoken eighth-grade boy with tiny braids, one recent Friday as he arrived early for a plate of fluffy waffles.
Gerice Williams, the lead case manager from the Department of Human Services. (Shedrick Pelt/For The Washington Post)
When he was in the seventh grade, Ayden missed more than 30 percent of the school year because 'school is boring,' he recalled. Williams and her team told him he could set an example for his classmates through his dedication and improvement.
'They helped me with my self-esteem and believed I could be a leader,' Ayden said. As an eighth-grader in the 2024-2025 school year, Ayden boasted a 90 percent attendance rate and was class president. The social workers helped him draw 'Ayden for President' signs for his campaign.
As the students ate breakfast, Williams watched for small indicators among children who might need the encouragement that Ayden once received. She brought those observations to a weekly attendance meeting with the social workers, an assistant principal, an attendance counselor, a school psychologist and others to discuss ways to get more help to struggling students.
Williams noted that a student who usually smiles was not smiling. She picked up that another student's behavior worsens whenever their hair is untidy, which made her suspect there might be difficulty at home.
One morning before Thanksgiving, Williams handed out construction paper and asked the students to write down something that made them grateful. Some children said they were thankful for their parents, or their school, but several raised their hands to say they could not think of anything to write. Williams encouraged them to dig deeper.
A few of the students wrote: 'I'm thankful to be alive.'
The truancy-crime pipeline
Without a functional early-warning system, sufficient after-school programs and adequate mental health staffing, the District's public school system was ill-prepared to keep young teens in school as carjackings and other violent crime spiked across the city in 2023.
The vast majority of students who missed class were struggling to readjust to in-person learning after the pandemic or get their basic needs met at home. But some of those children started getting into trouble.
Karon Blake had started leaving Brookland Middle School early to take care of his younger siblings, his friends previously told The Post. The 13-year-old had become more isolated during the pandemic, especially after a community football program was shut down.
Karon Blake's mother, Londen Blake, wears a necklace with a portrait of her son. (John McDonnell/The Washington Post)
About 4 a.m. on Jan. 7, 2023, a Brookland resident said he saw Karon and his friends breaking into cars. The man retrieved a handgun and began shooting, fatally wounding Karon.
'I'm just a kid,' Karon pleaded in the final moments of his life, according to home surveillance footage captured the night he was killed. Jason Lewis, 42, was later convicted on manslaughter charges.
In October 2023, five girls jumped Reginald 'Reggie' Brown, a 110-pound man with lupus, in an alleyway near Georgia Avenue. Brown was 64. The girls, ages 12 to 15, beat him to death.
During her trial, one of the girls told the judge that they had all skipped school — they attended several across the city — the previous day. She and her friends attacked the man because they were 'bored.' All five girls were convicted in the fatal attack and sentenced to rehabilitation with the District's Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services.
'We know that there's a high correlation between juveniles who are getting into trouble — I'll say delinquency — a high correlation between that and absenteeism,' Mendelson said at a December 2023 council hearing, echoing remarks he made a decade ago.
Under public pressure to address the youth crime crisis, the mayor put forward legislation in 2024 that would change the way schools dealt with truancy. It instructed elementary and middle schools to refer children with 10 unexcused absences to the Department of Human Services — not child welfare.
Education advocates embraced the proposal to involve the human services agency, which has a less punitive reputation than child welfare. District leadership finally seemed poised to correct a fundamental and well-known issue in the city's response to truancy and crime among its younger students, particularly those in middle schools.
But much of the proposal fell apart, again. The council didn't vote on the mayor's bill and instead proposed testing the new truancy referral system at nine schools, including some that served middle school students. When the pilot program got off the ground in October, it debuted at five campuses — all high schools. The decision was made because high schools have the highest rates of absenteeism, Kihn said.
By then, truancy rates at high schools had already returned to pre-pandemic levels, a Post analysis found. The proportion of children missing class in middle schools, though declining, remains higher than before 2020.
It has been more than a year since Irving LaBoard was killed. Police have made no arrests in his death, which is still under investigation as a homicide.
One day after Irving was found dead in Fort Dupont Park, the DC SCORES soccer team at Brookland was practicing at a nearby recreation center. Nathaniel Kundrat, a Brookland science teacher and soccer coach, received a call from a co-worker who told him to get his students inside.
Avion Evans, 14, was dead. A student at Ida B. Wells Middle School in the Takoma neighborhood of Northwest Washington, Avion had previously attended Brookland.
Police said he had gotten into a fight at the Brookland-CUA Metro station when a 16-year-old drew a gun and fired into Avion's chest. The older teen was later charged with second-degree murder.
Brookland science teacher Nathaniel Kundrat coaches the middle school's soccer team in March. (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)
Kundrat's students cried, hugged and promised one another it would be okay. They wrote poetry to process their feelings and tried to use the lessons they had learned from their after-school program to cope with the violence.
'Everything in soccer can help me in life,' Lyam, an eighth-grader, told The Post. 'Because when there's an obstacle in life, it is kind of like dealing with defenders on the field. You have to get past it.'
The children told their coach they wanted to do more to help the community. So Kundrat and the students organized a day to pick up trash around the Metro station. Last month, the team hosted an evening town hall at their middle school focused on reducing gun violence.
The group of middle school students concluded they could not wait for city leaders to address their concerns. They wanted to find their own solutions before there was another empty seat at Brookland Middle School.