Shepherding ‘leftovers,’ tracking parents

By Emily Richmond (contact)

Friday, Dec. 28, 2007 | 7:16 a.m.

Attendance Officer Derrick Turner is in his first year on the job, but has already heard myriad explanations for forgotten children. The parents were stuck in traffic. There was miscommunication over whose day it was for custody. An older brother forgot to pick up his little sister. A grandmother's car wouldn't start.

Roused from a deep sleep, a young father explained he had just switched to the graveyard shift and had not heard the alarm clock. A mother answered the door and said her younger children were sick, and she couldn't leave them alone.

Turner recalls one 10-year-old girl he chauffeured to a Boys & Girls Club this year. After school, she was supposed to walk home and then climb over the cinder block patio wall of her family's apartment. The sliding glass door would be left unlocked. After going inside, the girl was supposed to lock the door and call her aunt to check in.

But one afternoon the girl scaled the wall, only to find the sliding door locked. She returned to school.

In the back seat of Turner's car en route to the Boys & Girls Club, the little girl sobbed.

"I can't believe my mom left me! I can't believe my mom left me!"

To her, the situation was about more than a locked door.

"That one really shook me," Turner said.

The students who seem unfazed by being forgotten - sometimes again and again - can also be tough to take.

"It's upsetting to us as adults that someone didn't come for them, but little kids adapt," Turner said. "To them, it's normal - even though we know it's actually abnormal."

The morning hunt for truants and the afternoon runs for "leftovers" - students left on campus because no one has shown up to retrieve them at day's end - are the bookends to an attendance officer's daily routine. The officers also deliver files between campuses and ferry home students who are sick or have been suspended.

When a student is perpetually absent, attendance officers are dispatched to visit the home and talk to the family. Attendance officers also drive needy students to Operation School Bell, a joint project of the district, local agencies and charitable groups that provides clothing and supplies.

"You have to be a very flexible person to do this job," said Turner, who has worked in law enforcement as well as juvenile and detention services. "Sometimes you're an investigator, sometimes you're a social worker."

The system would fail if the 24 officers and three dispatchers didn't work as a team, Turner said. He listens closely to the radio transmissions not only for his own calls, but also for opportunities to help a fellow officer in the field. His colleagues routinely do the same.

"We're all parts of a big wheel," Turner said.

They are armed with little more than a two-way radio and a clipboard. Attendance officers carry no cuffs and no weapons and are forbidden to physically restrain students. This year the officers switched from khaki pants and logo shirts to dark blue uniforms. That's helped them be taken more seriously by some of the older truants, but it's also given them a passing resemblance to North Las Vegas Police.

That doesn't always work in the district's favor, said Pam Gunter, the senior attendance officer and supervisor.

"Some of the families are afraid to talk to us because they think they're in trouble with the police," Gunter said. "We have to reassure them."

Turner said he's learned to turn his back to the door after ringing the bell so that his uniform isn't the first thing someone sees through the peephole.

At Helen Jydstrup Elementary School, Turner is already a familiar - and welcome - face. On a recent afternoon he entered the office and found six students seated in a row. The day's leftovers calls had begun.

Michelle Auer, the school's office clerk, said all parents are encouraged to sign up for Safe Key, a city-run child care program that operates on campus. That way, if a problem arises, the child has somewhere safe to go until the parent can get to the school. But parents resist, Auer said, because either they don't expect to need the service or they don't want to pay the $7 daily cost.

So that means the office staff must stay late and play baby sitter until an attendance officer can ferry the kids to a Boys & Girls Club or a family member arrives.

In one recent incident Metro Police brought back a boy who had been found wandering up and down a nearby street after 4 p.m. Jydstrup was the fifth school he had attended in three years, and he couldn't remember the way home.

"I felt awful for the little guy," Auer said.

Without the help of attendance officers such as Turner, the school's staff would be unable to leave anywhere close to on time, Auer said.

"We really depend on him," she said.

On this afternoon, Turner is asked to take a third grader to a Boys & Girls Club. He collects the boy's paperwork from Auer. The boy hefts a Superman backpack onto his shoulder and walks with Turner to the parking lot.

Turner tells him not to be scared - they are going to the Boys & Girls Club.

The boy shrugs. He's not scared.

"I've been there before."