Pupil personnel workers (PPW) are natural partners for the Center for Families, Children and the Courts (CFCC) Truancy Court Program (TCP), because they are charged by the state's school systems with getting children to come to school all day, every day, on time. Two of the resourceful PPWs who work with TCP are Anne Arundel County's Paul Stack and Sue Meyers.
 
Stack and Meyers deal with the entire range of truants, from the "soft truants," with 5 to 20 absences or tardies in the prior two marking periods, to the "chronic truants" who miss much more.  Sometimes, they say, the problem only needs a quick fix - connecting a family to resources, such as a washing machine when children lack clean clothes.  For the "soft" or early truants, they have found that "the faster you get in, the easier it is to undo" the underlying problem causing truant behavior.  Because resources are often spent for intensive interventions that target the more serious truants, however, Stack and Meyers are not always able to give these early or soft truants the attention they need.  That is why they appreciate the TCP so much; it is a turn-key 10-week approach that fits the niche beautifully.

Meyers and Stack are very pleased with the implementation of the TCP.  They are so confident about the program's effectiveness that they intend to continue running it even after CFCC's direct involvement ends.  Meyers says Anne Arundel teachers are great fans of the program, too, even though it means more paperwork.  In fact, she says, teachers send notes and give a "heads up" about how the students are doing whenever they get new information they believe can be useful to the TCP team.

The PPWs praise CFCC staff generously. After-school basketball?  TCP Mentor Arion Alston has done it with PPW Paul Stack.  Cell phone numbers for Arion and TCP Coordinator Jessica Stowell are programmed into Sue Meyers' phone, and "I now consider them my friends," she says. (Photos, A. Alston)
 
See more on PPWs