Gulfton Truancy Reduction Demonstration Project, Houston, TX

they kept the student home to take care of family members (including younger siblings).
Twenty-six percent of parents told officers that the students were absent due to illness.
Parents also reported on their relationships with their children and the schools. Eightyfour
percent said they talk to their children about their problems, but 14% said they had difficulty
disciplining them. Only 4% suspected that their children were using drugs. Fifty-seven percent
of parents said they had met with teachers and/or principals on both school progress and truancy
issues.
Police officers made notes about their observations in the home. In general, officers felt
that the living conditions met the basic needs of the students; there were only ten cases where
this was not true. In addition, only 6% (7) homes were reported as having health or hygiene
issues.
In an effort to explore the effectiveness of the police visits on attendance, 110 school
records were obtained and data analyses were conducted to explore the short and long-term
effects. Graphical representations of the pattern of absences among students who received knock
and talks appear on the next pages. These graphs show the average absence rate per day, where a
1 means all students were absent, and a zero means all students were present for that day.
Consequently, a .5 means half of the knock and talk students missed that day of school. In
general, these graphs indicate that absence rates appear to drop immediately following the police
visit; the long-term effects are less clear.
The first graph represents the average absences over the 60 days prior to the police visit
and the 60 days following police visit. The zero point is the day in which the police visit
occurred. Each circle represents the average absence rate for each school day. Three regression
lines (linear, cubic, and quadratic) are included to explore different patterns in the data. A
Evaluation of the Gulfton Truancy Reduction Demonstration Project 8