More than a quarter of students in San Antonio are chronically absent, meaning they’re missing at least 10% of the school year.
That’s higher than the state average of 20% and higher than in the Houston region, where that average is 23%, according to the most recent data from the 2022-23 school year. Attendance records have slowly improved since absenteeism was exacerbated by the COVID-19 shutdown in 2020, but the issue is still top of mind for school leaders since attendance directly links to literacy rates and public school funding.
And the issue isn’t tackled by school leaders alone.
Carla Obledo assumed the role of presiding judge for the City of San Antonio’s municipal court in January 2020. Weeks later, she saw the court building off South Frio Street close as court business moved online during the pandemic.
Later, she also saw the full scope of what the shutdown meant for some of the city’s youngest residents: parents hesitant to put their children back in classrooms and some students deciding not to go back at all.
“There’s still way too much [chronic absenteeism] in San Antonio,” Obledo said during a Dec. 2 interview. “You hear people and they say, ‘Oh, well, those kids are just truant.’ And I don’t know that it’s just the kids that are truant. … There’s a lot of issues that are causing kids to be truant: transportation issues, housing issues, food insecurity.”
In 2023, the municipal court launched an “Attendance Matters” campaign to increase awareness around absenteeism issues and share community resources that could help families and students struggling to get to school.
But the municipal court has been grappling with attendance and truancy way before COVID-19 threw a wrench in public education.
Since at least 2015 — when the state largely decriminalized truancy with House Bill 2398 — the court has employed several interventionists, known as juvenile court case managers, providing liaisons between school districts and the municipal court in non-criminal cases involving minors.
School districts can file criminal charges against parents through the city attorney’s office if mediation doesn’t work, but cases like that are rare and the punishment includes fines.
Currently, the court has 10 case managers working with 11 San Antonio-area school districts and four charter school networks. Usually embedded on school campuses, their goal is mediation between families, school districts and the court before a district files any criminal charges against parents for truancy.
“What I would always tell the families that I worked with was that my job was to help them address the issue and fix attendance to avoid any further court of involvement,” said Katie Kappler, a senior juvenile case manager for the city. “So we are not involved with the criminal aspect of it, where it could lead to a charge.”
Three of the court’s juvenile case managers are funded by a grant from Texas’s Office of the Governor for truancy prevention. The city has to apply for it every year, and the grant amount keeps shrinking, Kappler said: in 2015, the court had 20 grant-funded juvenile case managers.
The San Antonio Report sat down with Obledo and Kappler to talk about the municipal court’s intervention efforts in chronic absenteeism, the challenges those efforts face and why attendance matters on a city level.
The conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
As presiding judge and someone who has a larger overview of the municipal court system, what does your work with chronic absenteeism actually look like?
Obledo: So we’re trying to provide a community of agencies and support that my team doesn’t offer because we are still a court. We even bring in city departments that help support us to provide those services for students and their families.
It’s also trying to do new things. I don’t want to be doing the same old thing and expect a different result. If we want a different result, then there’s probably a different solution. That’s what I really like about our juvenile team, is they’re always willing to try new things like the Attendance Matters campaign and the Senior Summits, and they’re just always up for for a new challenge.
What happens when a family gets called in for mediation through the municipal court for truancy?
Obledo: The school districts will provide names and addresses, and then the court mails out letters to the students and their families, summoning them to court if a student’s truant behavior does not improve. It’s not a criminal case, it’s still civil. If they don’t come, there’s not a warrant that gets issued or anything like that, but they do appear before a judge, and the judge will go over an agreement with them. Our juvenile case managers work very closely with the students and their families to find out if there’s any support services that the family needs so that the child does get to school every day.
Kappler: Not everyone shows up, but we get usually a decent turnout. Then we’ll do it by family. So whether there’s one kiddo or six in that family, it typically is a family issue. Usually, when the school submits that information, they also look at the whole family, so that the parent is not having to come in multiple times.
Obledo: And these are kids that have been identified by the school that are not attending school regularly, and they’ve already tried interventions at the school and they’re not working. So the next step is for them to be called a court, to come to mediation, to come before a judge, and again, it’s not punitive. There’s not a fine. Nobody is incarcerated, but it’s kind of like a last chance.
What happens if a school district decides to file criminal charges against a parent for truancy and the parent is found guilty?
Obledo: There’s a fine. There’s not a whole lot of those cases actually filed. The school district works with the city attorney’s office, and the city attorney’s office has some requirements that they want the school districts to meet before they’ll accept a case. But that case load is nowhere near what the juvenile case managers are working with.
Kappler: Even with the criminal cases, the goal is always still to get the attendance improved, not the fines.
How else has the municipal court been creative in addressing the chronic absenteeism issue in San Antonio?
Obledo: Something different that we tried in 2023 was our “Senior Summit: Rise to Graduation” event. We put that thing together in three weeks and we invited schools. We just worked with SAISD at that time to see if it was going to work. It’s kind of a mediation on steroids, and I had like four judges who went over mediation agreements with the students and their families, and we actually had community partners here at the court from SA Ready to Work, the library, Alamo Colleges and others. Not only were those community partners there to provide resources for them, to help them graduate, but we also wanted to show them the possibilities that could happen when they do graduate.
Another neat thing that the juvenile case managers are working on is a transition docket for chronically absent kids that are going from fifth to sixth grade, eighth to ninth grade. Unfortunately, a lot of times you lose a lot of students during those transitions, so they’re working very closely with those kiddos.
Kappler: We have a parenting class that’s evolved a lot over the last two years that it’s existed. It started as a parenting class talking about parenting styles, but over time, we have kind of shifted it to focus on school attendance. We primarily use it for elementary age parents. A lot of the parents like that class because the case managers do the educational part with it, to talk to the parents about it, but it’s also very discussion-based. We’re working on kind of expanding that class to reach as many parents as we can, where we’re going to start implementing that on campus, not just here at the court.
You have a lot of purview over what kind of initiatives come from the municipal court. Why are youth issues something you’ve really taken under your wing as presiding judge for five years now?
Obledo: Focusing on youth issues strengthens our community. It makes our community safer. I’m born and raised in San Antonio, you know? I don’t like hearing about how, ‘Oh, Austin is doing this’, or ‘Dallas is doing this.’ You know, we have a beautiful culture and heritage heere in San Antonio and we should be proud. I think that some kids just get lost.
I do come from a fairly privileged background. I went to private school, and I’ve never worked in education, but communicating with my team and witnessing what’s happening in the community makes me want to do more for the community, even in the municipal court’s limited role.
We are a court so we can’t really, you know, take a stance. We have to be unbiased and fair and all that. But, on some certain issues, I think that we can be a court that actually helps move people along to a better to a better position — to a better station in life
