An Analysis of Truancy Causes and Prevention Programming in Clark County, Nevada

In the United States truancy prevention is lacking two key elements to success; research that explains the causes of truancy and empirical evidence for best practices of truancy prevention. Truancy has been a problem in academics since the early 1900’s, when truancy became illegal. Since then, truancy rates have continued to see a steady increase, and today approximately 10% of public school students in the United States are truant every day (Maynard et al., 2017). To combat this problem, research needs to be conducted to understand why truancy happens. However, there is a severe lack of research on this topic; without understanding why truancy happens how can prevention programs effectively lower truancy? There is also a lack of studies that examine and build a list of best practices for truancy prevention programs to follow.This study aims to fix both of these gaps in the literature surrounding truancy while also helping a community-based truancy prevention program. In Clark County, Nevada truancy among its student population is over 30%. The Truancy Prevention Outreach Program (TPOP) was created to combat the growing truancy rate by using a whole-family wrap-around approach and providing services to the whole family to help students stay in school. This study consists of quantitative and qualitative data provided by TPOP with the goal of understanding truancy causes and if the programs methods are effective. The quantitative data examined the effectiveness of the program as well as how the effectiveness effected academic achievement. These results showed that the program was effective in lowering truancy rates and as attendance increased so did the students’ academic achievement markers. The qualitative data was examined for evidence behind the cause of truancy, and how families reacted to the program. The themes found in the qualitative data suggest that the family connection is the most important reason why the program was effective and that the reasons for truancy are vast. Finally, a mixed methods analysis was conducted using both the quantitative and qualitative data, which examined the data for explanations as to why the program worked well for some students and not for others. This study brings to light more questions regarding truancy research and paves the way for more research in this area to be conducted. The results of this study were also used by TPOP as evidence that the program does work and guided them to finding areas for improvement. The results of this study provided statistically significant findings that can help to build a set of best practices for truancy prevention program in the future.