Shreveport Police Dept.

Date: January 9, 2007

Phone: 318/673-6932 Fax: 318/673-6933

Contact: Kacee Hargrave, Public Information Officer

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Mayor Glover keeps Truancy Center open

Mayor Cedric Glover announced today that the city will fund the Rutherford House Truancy Center for the last half of the school year.

The Truancy Center opened in 1998 with the help of a Shreveport Police Department Weed and Seed grant and the City of Shreveport.

The Truancy Center works with students who are observed walking the streets during school hours. Officers who see these truants pick them up and take them to Rutherford House, where the Truancy Center works to make contact with the parents and return the students to their school. Conferences are scheduled with parents, the student and school officials to determine why the student was not at school. The program operates in a similar manner to the Rutherford House’s Curfew Center, which handles juveniles who are on the streets after curfew hours.

The State of Louisiana currently funds a Truancy and Assessment Service Center for 17 parishes, but it is limited to kindergarten through fifth grade. Money to service middle and high school students was not allocated by the State Legislature, which put funding for the Rutherford House’s Truancy Center in jeopardy.

When learning that the Truancy Center’s future was uncertain, Mayor Glover authorized the donation of $15,000 to fund the program through the school year.

Glover also has pledged to support the efforts of Rutherford House during the next legislative session to expand the program to include middle and high school students.

“We have an obligation to do everything we can to keep our children in school and to protect them,” Mayor Glover said. “The Rutherford House will provide services that will help these students remain and hopefully succeed in an educational setting.”

The Truancy Center gets an average of 300 students each year. The program is designed to keep children in school, reduce daytime juvenile crime and prevent young people from becoming victims of crime. It is estimated that 80 percent of high school dropouts are chronically truant, and 60 percent of all violent juvenile crime occurs between 8 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. On average, 75 percent of the local truants were males, and 10 percent were repeat offenders.

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View all SPD press releases at www.ci.shreveport.la.us/dept/police/spdnews