education

California Federation of Teachers Endorses Kamala Harris for Attorney General

rsumner — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 14:09:23 -0800

CFT Joins former CA Superintendent of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin in backing Harris’ candidacy.

SAN FRANCISCO -- The California Federation of Teachers, which represents 120,000 faculty and other school employees in public and private schools and colleges, from early childhood through higher education, today announced its endorsement of San Francisco District Attorney Kamala D. Harris’ candidacy for California Attorney General.

"There is a direct connection between public safety and public education, and I believe that California’s Attorney General can use her office to keep our streets safe by injecting innovative ideas into our justice system,” said Harris. “I am honored to earn the endorsement of CFT, and I look forward to working with CFT’s members to protect public education and public safety as California Attorney General."

CFT joins former California Superintendent of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin in endorsing Harris’ candidacy.

In 2007, Harris launched a citywide anti-truancy campaign focused on elementary school kids. After learning that nearly half of all of the chronically truant school kids in San Francisco were in elementary school, Harris sent letters to every parent in the district calling attention to the situation, held truancy mediation sessions with parents and began filing charges against parents who still failed to get their kids in school. The result: elementary schools improved their attendance rate the following year by an average of 20%, the San Francisco Chronicle reported, as "citywide efforts, including parental prosecution, appeared to be paying off."

As San Francisco’s District Attorney, Harris has used her nearly 20 years of prosecutorial experience to focus intensively on fighting violent crime. She increased felony conviction rates, expanded services to victims of crime and their families, created new prosecution divisions focused on child assault, public integrity and environmental crimes, and launched innovative initiatives to prevent re-offending.

This work is paying off – the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office has more than doubled its trial conviction rate for gun felonies to 90 percent. Under her leadership, the office has sent 70 percent more serious and violent offenders to State Prison. According to the State of California Department of Justice, the office’s overall felony conviction rate is at its highest point in nearly 15 years.

San Francisco D.A. put truants on the most-wanted list

rsumner — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 09:09:00 -0800

If elected California Attorney General next year, San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris wants to make truancy in the public schools a very big deal.

Harris, a two-term D.A. and a front-runner in the Democratic primary for the state’s top law officer, helped engineer an impressive 23 percent drop in truancy among elementary students in the San Francisco School District in the past year. She’s taking aim now at the older kids and already showing some signs of success.

And, if voters bring her to Sacramento, she has designs on taking the truancy program statewide.

“What we simply did was put the bright, infrared light of public safety and law enforcement on the fact that these children are not in school,” Harris said in an interview with Cabinet Report. “There’s a very direct connection between the elementary school truant and the high school dropout and the victim of crime and the perpetrator of crime.”

Citing a recent study from the University of California, Santa Barbara, she noted the direct cost to state’s juvenile justice system from dropouts is $1.1 billion annually. She said the expense exceeds $20 billion a year when related costs from health care and social services are included – and that doesn’t count the cost to the state’s future workforce and the California economy.

“It is all of those costs,” she said. “None of which have anything to do solely with caring about a child. It has to do with thinking about how we can be more effective and efficient in a state that is on the verge of bankruptcy.”

The initiative in San Francisco started about four years ago when Harris ordered an analysis of the city’s homicide victims under the age of 25 years old. What she found was that 94 percent of them were high school dropouts.

When she contacted the school district looking for further insight she learned that nearly 10 percent of the student population was considered habitually truant and nearly half of them were from elementary schools.

The first step was simply to write letters to parents on the D.A.’s letterhead warning them that if children were not in school, the adults could be prosecuted. Later she helped set up one of the first Truancy Courts in California where a single judge has jurisdiction over not only the student and the parents but also the government bureaucracy to ensure no one falls through the cracks.

Efforts were also coordinated with the San Francisco schools and Superintendent Carlos Garcia, whom Harris gives much credit in making the program successful.

Keith Choy, coordinator of the district’s Stay in School program, said Harris was instrumental in helping bring together existing city services to confront the problem.

“We’re really pleased,” he said. “We didn’t think the district by itself could really take on the whole problem. We didn’t have the teams, we didn’t have the social workers and support staff. And with all the budget cuts we couldn’t go out and run in the streets and do the follow up.”

He said there was an epiphany when school officials, the health department and human services all realized they were working on the same kids. “We found that because of privacy laws and other things we wouldn’t normally talk to each other,” he said.

“Kamala’s efforts have really helped us put together a longer term plan,” he explained. “Let’s get to the kids earlier, let’s give the families more support and give us some time to begin working on the older kids.”

Harris has only prosecuted about 20 cases so far but the threat of the courts has been very effective.

What can schools expect if she’s elected AG?

Districts would likely be encouraged if not facilitated to take a closer look at their truancy problems. Better recordkeeping and coordination with social service providers would be a starting point but she said she would mostly use the office’s bully-pulpit to make sure the public understands the connection between truants and public safety.

“As someone who has personally prosecuted murders and career criminals that I care about children issues because I can see who that six-year-old is going to become in about ten years,” she said. “Yes, we have to have a system that reacts after a crime has occurred, but we also have to be effective about preventing crime before it occurs and one of the best indicators is elementary school truancy.”

Saving Public Resources and Protecting Our Most Important Resource: Children

admin — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 10:50:28 -0700

Education, public safety, and the economy: three vastly complex issue areas that time and again are proven to be inextricably linked.

By doing what it takes to keep kids in school in every corner of our state, we can save literally billions of dollars in public resources and greatly improve public safety.

Most of us in law enforcement have known this for many years. As San Francisco's District Attorney, I see the direct impact of what happens when kids don't stay in school; young lives are lost to street violence or prison at an appalling rate, our state loses more resources and our communities are less safe.

The wake-up calls keep sounding. The California Dropout Research Project at UC Santa Barbara just published a devastating report exposing the impact of high school dropouts on California's economy. The report concludes that high school dropouts account for a disproportionate amount of juvenile crime. By contrast, graduating from high school results in a 17% reduction in violent crime and a decrease of approximately 10% in property and drug-related crimes. The juvenile crimes committed by dropouts cost California $1.1 billion per year. Add in social and medical costs, lost income taxes and associated economic losses, and the report estimates that dropouts cost the state more than $24 billion per year.

To close the horrendous budget deficit this year, California lawmakers reduced the public school system budget by $4.3 billion. Failing to educate our children and lower dropout rates is a recipe for disaster, and the price will be paid by communities and individuals victimized by crime. The direct connection between education, crime and victimization is clear. Harvard sociologist Bruce Western and Becky Pettit found that the cumulative risk of death or imprisonment by age 30-34 nearly triples for men who do not finish high school. Fourteen percent of white men and a staggering 62% of black men who don't finish high school are dead or in prison by the age of 30-34.

What can be done? Plenty.

First, dropout prevention has to start early. The problem should be red-flagged when children first become habitual truants. Nationwide, 75% of all truant children will eventually drop out of school. In San Francisco, we found that 10% of all students are chronic truants and 40%, or more than 2,000 of those truant students, are in elementary school.

That's right. Elementary school.

So we targeted that problem and partnered with the San Francisco Unified School District to combat school truancy.

At the time, many people asked why the city's chief prosecutor was worried about the problem of school attendance. My answer was simple, and as our partnership now enters its fourth year, the reason remains the same: a child going without an education is a crime and it leads to more dangerous crimes. My job is to protect the public and combating truancy is a smart approach to crime prevention. We can either pay attention now, or pay the price later.

So every fall I send out letters to parents across San Francisco letting them know that truancy is against the law and that I will enforce that law. During the school year, prosecutors from my office hold mediations with parents and truant students at schools across the city to reinforce this message and urge them to get help to improve their children's attendance. We asked business and faith leaders to engage with the city's schools to provide mentors and resources. We opened a stay-in-school hotline and coordinated support services for families needing help. In most cases, attendance improves. But when it does not, my office prosecutes parents in a specialized Truancy Court we created that combines supervision and services for those families. To date, I have only had to prosecute 20 parents of young children for truancy.

Our groundbreaking strategy has worked. The majority of parents who have been brought to Truancy Court have dramatically improved their children's attendance in school. But the effects of the strategy ripple far beyond these families. In the last year alone, truancy among elementary school students dropped by an average of 20%. In this new school year, my office will work closely with school district staff to expand our strategy to include high school age chronically truant students.

We have the tools that can start solving this problem. But first, we have got to commit to a bipartisan agenda that is smart on crime. The lesson for those of us in law enforcement is that we have to embrace our responsibility for crime prevention and engage in the serious business of helping to build healthier communities.

Preventing truancy does more than protect public safety. It protects precious public resources in the midst of California's worst economic crisis in history. If ever there were a time to reassess how our state spends public resources, the time is unquestionably now.

Let's start a serious dialogue about our collective responsibility to change the odds for children and youth. I urge you to contact your local District Attorney, school board and other elected officials about this problem. And please let me know what else I might have left out, how else we can work to solve this problem. Kids will either get an education in school or in the streets. The fabric of our community, and the future of our economy, depends on our ability to ensure that education happens in class.

Harris is the author of Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor's Plan to Make Us Safer.