Children’s Cabinet will tackle truancy
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Viola Miller, the commissioner of the state Department of Children’s Services, provided an update to a legislative committee Monday on the progress of the Children’s Cabinet.
Gov. Phil Bredesen created the Children’s Cabinet early in his administration to coordinate the work of the various state departments aimed at helping Tennessee’s youngest residents.
Miller said the cabinet’s first two targets are truancy and what she called “systems of care” to provide better coordination within and among departments so parents “don’t have to go all over the place” to arrange for state services.
Sen. Larry Trail, D-Murfreesboro and chairman of the Select Committee on Children and Youth, asked Miller if the cabinet was trying to cut down on turf wars among departments.
Miller, who has been on the job six weeks, said that was possible with some issues but not truancy.
“Everyone would like to give it away and hope it’s someone else’s problem,” she said. “It’s such a recalcitrant issue.”
She cited a report by the comptroller’s office issued in January that found truancy contributes to poor student achievement, higher dropout rates and many related societal problems.
The comptroller’s report follows individual efforts to deter truancy in some of the state’s major cities. In Memphis, city officials pondered a curfew banning school-aged children from public places during school hours, and police last fall began periodic sweeps of truants to get them back into school.
Chattanooga has adopted a program allowing the eviction of parents from public housing if their children miss too many days of school after it was reported that more than 20 percent of the 1,700 school-aged children living in the city’s housing developments were truant.
Knoxville launched a truancy program several years ago that holds the parents responsible when children have a certain number of unexcused absences. Officials there say the rates of teenage pregnancy and property crime have fallen since the program began.
Miller said the Children’s Cabinet hopes to improve coordination of services for children.
“The concept is to bring services together around families,” she said. “Many are at risk due to unstable housing, poverty or poor medical care. We need all the resources to come together in common cause in the best interests of the child.”
She said her department also is working to recruit more foster parents and better facilitate adoptions, which she acknowledged the state doesn’t do very well.
“The (adoption) system reflects a belief system that was in effect in the 1950s and ’60s,” she said. “Come about May or June that will be at the top of my list. In their hearts people think they’re doing the right thing, but the system has not evolved. It does not reflect best practices.”
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