Editor’s note: This is the first article in a two-part series on truancy.

BROOKINGS – The 2021-22 school year was expected to be challenging, but no one could have predicted the issues that have afflicted school districts across the state. 

In Brookings, like other districts, truancy is on the rise. 

Brookings Superintendent Klint Willert summarized the issue with the following statement, in a November interview with the Register: “Students pass the first threshold by entering the building but then refuse to go to class. Instead, they chose to wander the hallways or hang out in the parking lot.” 

Truancy has long been an issue for school districts, but the current trend is troubling to administrators. Many are searching for reasons why, right now, truancy is becoming such an issue. Willert theorized that the COVID-plagued end to the 2020 school year and the remote option during the 2020-21 school year may be playing a significant role.

“If I left the school in March 2020 and I found myself disengaged and not having to show up or do things, and then I remote learned last year because I could, and there was limited engagement and flat out disengagement by the student, but now this year the remote option is taken away and now I have to be there, it’s pretty difficult to shed the pattern of behavior that’s been established over the past 15 to 18 months,” Willert said. 

Students at Brookings High School have also become more defiant, contributing to the “changing culture” within the high school. Phrases like “make me,” which are not new to the schools, have recently become more common in the hallways and have characterized the defiant, non-compliant behavior. The defiance is significantly contributing to the challenge of teachers and administrators enforcing class attendance at the high school.

Juvenile justice reform 

In the early 2000s/2010s, South Dakota had the second highest number of kids (per capita) in detention centers, according to former Gov. Dennis Daugaard’s State of the State speech in January 2015. Kids were placed in detention centers for things as serious as violent crimes including rape, burglary and murder, as well as nonviolent crimes such as drug abuse and truancy. According to Daugaard, in 2013, seven of every 10 youth committed to the Department of Corrections were for misdemeanor offenses, probation violations, and status offenses like underage drinking or truancy.

Lawmakers in the state saw this troubling statistic and decided to begin the process of reforming the juvenile justice system. In 2011, the Juvenile Detention Alternative Initiative (JDAI) was implemented in Pennington and Minnehaha counties. According to the JDAI page on the state’s Unified Judicial System website, the mission statement for South Dakota JDAI is “to work collaboratively to promote a more effective and efficient juvenile justice system through the implementation of JDAI’s juvenile justice best practice standards in South Dakota.” 

The key element of JDAI is to eliminate the contact that juveniles who commit nonviolent crime have with violent offenders.

In Pennington and Minnehaha counties, “both sites have achieved remarkable results, closely mirroring other successful jurisdictions nationwide,” the state judicial system reported. It was reported in 2018 that the number of youth committed to detention centers dropped by 65% since 2013. During that time period, felony arrests remained the same, “despite population increases.” Brookings County currently has that same JDAI program.

The success of JDAI in these two counties prompted lawmakers to address changes statewide. In 2015, lawmakers passed Senate Bill 73, the “Juvenile Justice Reform Act,” as it is commonly referred to, which caused sweeping changes in the state’s juvenile justice system. 

“Those reforms (in Senate Bill 73) eliminated certain offenses from being Department of Corrections (DOC) referable,” Brookings County State’s Attorney Dan Nelson said. “Now in order to be a qualifying offense, in terms of going to the DOC, it has to be a violent felony. Anything under a violent felony is referred to as a non-qualifying offense, meaning that probation is the first option the court has to consider. If it is a non-qualifying offense, probation is what is ordered.”

Nelson says that when ordered, the term of probation was also lessened. The typical term now is between four to six months, Nelson said, but prior to the Juvenile Justice Act, it was longer. Truancy is considered a non-qualifying offense, which means that, according to Nelson, on your first and second offense (for truancy citation) it’s a $100 fine. Once the third offense for truancy occurs, the truant can be placed on probation, but by then “the school year is usually over” Nelson said.

Before the juvenile justice reform, truant offenders first went on probation, but if they were repeat offenders, the court system had the DOC at its disposal, Nelson said. With the 2015 reform, placing juveniles in detention centers for truancy was “taken off the table.” 

Cost was also a significant reason why juvenile justice was reformed in South Dakota. According to Daugaard, when juveniles are placed in the DOC, the cost can range anywhere from $41,000 to $144,000 per year, depending on the program. The staggering cost to house juveniles away from their homes influenced reform in the state, allowing nonviolent offenders to return to their communities. Reform on the system would save millions, Daugaard said. 

Compulsory attendance age

Another piece to this complex puzzle is the compulsory school attendance age in South Dakota. In 2009, the state moved to change the compulsory age for attendance from 16 to 18. That bill, Senate Bill 126, flew through the House and the Senate, stating that any person who has control of a child, between the ages of 6 and 18, “shall cause the child to regularly and annually attend some public or nonpublic school.”

At the time, bill sponsor Sen. Dave Knudson expressed that some schools in the state were concerned about having students who didn’t want to be there and could become disruptive. 

Fast-forward to 2019: the South Dakota House Education Committee moved forward with House Bill 1232, which would lower the compulsory attendance age from 18 back down to 16. 

Primary bill sponsor Rep. Lana Greenfield said the bill came forward after speaking to school administrators and principals in eastern South Dakota. 

“We seemed to have added insult to injury and our schools have become holding tanks as a result of Senate Bill 73,” Greenfield said. “We’ve taken crime and destruction numbers out of our correctional facilities and have passed them on seemingly to our local schools and our local communities to handle.”

Greenfield added, “We continue to tie the hands of the schools by making mandates such as the mandatory attendance age of 18.” 

A former principal and superintendent in the Huron School District, Terry Nebelsick spoke in favor of HB 1232, stating that it would seem that keeping kids in school until 18 made for better success. However, he found that the district had better success if students who did not want to be there dropped out, only to later return once they realized the value of a high school diploma. Nebelsick said they had much better success graduating these students in their alternative school once they returned. 

Opponents of the bill argued that lowering the age would be a sign that “we are giving up” or turning their backs on these kids.

The bill narrowly passed the House Education Committee but died in the House of Representatives in a 40-27 vote. 

Diversion programs

“Juvenile justice is a very challenging area of the law right now,” Nelson said. “We are trying to move away from incarcerating kids for not going to school. And we have.”

Nelson said that research and statistics show that when you incarcerate a truant juvenile, you are making the problem worse and not dealing with the issue.

“You’re not getting to the heart of why a kid is not going to school,” Nelson said. 

Nelson explained that incarcerating a juvenile for not going to school is not effective – it actually perpetuates the problem. Nelson said that the Unified Judicial System (UJS) has found that when juveniles are exposed to other troubled juveniles in the Juvenile Detention Center (JDC) system, those “bad” characteristics are taken on.

“So when you have a juvenile who’s being incarcerated for truancy and he or she is spending time with another incarcerated juvenile who is in for first-degree burglary, you are mixing the truancy kid with the violent offender, and they obviously have different needs and different reasons why they are there,” Nelson said. “We don’t want the kid who’s simply there on truancy to learn those bad behaviors from the kid who was incarcerated.”

The UJS has collected data that shows that the example that Nelson gave is often times what happens in the JDC system. 

“The judges, myself as state’s attorney, probation officers, what we’ve decided to do and what we believe is a more appropriate way to handle (truancy) is through the diversion programs,” Nelson said. 

The diversion programs in Brookings are run through the Boys & Girls Club, in partnership with the State’s Attorney’s Office. Those programs include Teen Court, which was established in 2007, as well as newer programs such as the Brookings County Youth Diversion Program (BCYDP), which was established in fall 2020 for more serious nonviolent offenses, and the Brookings School Attendance Program, which was established in 2020. Data provided by the programs show that 62% of the youth who participated in the BCYDP were recommended for a mental health/chemical dependency evaluation.

Nelson wants to dispel the notion that the system has “gone soft” on kids now. He says that the old system “didn’t care about the ‘why,’ the only thing we cared about was the easy short-term answers.”

“The answer, short term was ‘I’m going to lock you up if you don’t go to school,’ but it never addressed the why,” Nelson said. “So what we are trying to do in these new programs is address the why, because that’s the long-term answer.”

This is not to say that juveniles are now immune from detention centers, Nelson says. Violent offenders, primarily, are still subject to the DOC. In Brookings County, 10 juveniles, since 2019, have been placed in the DOC. 

To learn more about the Juvenile Justice Reform in South Dakota, visit jjri.sd.gov.

Contact Addison DeHaven at adehaven@brookingsregister.com.