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The Trouble with Truancy - Part 2

By: Cynthia L. Landrum
As my letter in Part 1 of this series illustrated, it's fairly easy to have a truant child.  Missing two weeks due to illness is quite easy to have happen, and the requirement that many districts have that a doctor's note is the only way to excuse the absence means a classist system of who can and will have absences excused and who will end up with a truant child.  All other things being equal, two children out for two weeks with the same two colds can end up with very different fates, not because of the nature of the child, or the diligence of the parent, but simply for economic reasons.

That income levels and truancy are related is no surprise.  A recent MLive article reported:
"Some districts, including many affluent suburban ones, reported little or no truancy. The Forest Hills schools outside Grand Rapids reported five truant students among 10,147 enrolled, and Bloomfield Hills in suburban Detroit just 32 out of 12,306. But Kentwood, another metropolitan Grand Rapids district, had 590 truant cases, representing 6.8 percent of its students, according to the data."

So what?  What does it matter if a child is labeled truant?  Well, it turns out it matters a great deal.   In Michigan, a truant child can mean a fine to a parent, and even jail time

Well, apparently that wasn't enough for our Michigan Republicans who control our legislature.  This week, Governor Snyder signed a new bill into law that cuts welfare to families if a child is truant. 

So imagine, if you will, a low-income family with three children.  The youngest child gets sick for a week, and the parent keeps her home.  It's a mild cold, so there's no need to see a doctor, but the child misses a week of school.  Now they have 5 of the 10 days towards being considered truant.  The child gets sick again.  The family can't afford to see a doctor, but keeps the child home again.  Now the child is truant.  The parents are then fined for having a truant child.  And, now, our government takes food away from the whole family. 

Governor Snyder said, "Much like the Pathways to Potential program, this legislation brings together parents, schools and the state to determine obstacles that keep students from being in school and how to overcome them."  When my child was sick a couple of years ago with a mild cold and I wrote the letter to my school board in frustration, it did bring parents and school together.  My child's principal had told me there was no way she could excuse the absence without a doctor's note.  The school board seemed to hear the situation, and agree that the policy was flawed.  Two years later, the policy is still (or back) in place.  Children are still being considered truant because of illness and income.  Now Governor Snyder thinks this will bring together parents, schools, and state?  Yes, it will -- unnecessarily.  It's completely unnecessary to bring the state into this level of involvement between schools and parents.  The fact that it's penalizing lower income people who are already struggling with the truancy laws is unconscionable. 
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The Trouble with Truancy - Part 1

By: Cynthia L. Landrum
Two years ago, I wrote our school district about the truancy policy.  At that time, I was told that I had presented a good case, and they were going to change their policy.  I don't know if it actually did change and then changed back, but looking at the policy on my school district's webpage, the policy is the same as the one I complained about.  In this post, I'll share that letter.  In my next post, I'll talk about why it matters, and what the Michigan government has just done that makes this even worse.


Dear JPS School Board,

I’m writing to you because I’ve been disturbed about the JPS elementary school attendance policy for some time.  Specifically, I find it disturbing that the only way an absence can be “excused” is with a doctor’s note.  My chief issue with this policy is that I think it is, in a word, classist.  In addition, I think that it represents a misuse of the medical system and it fails to respect a parent’s reasonable judgment.

The policy as it now stands requires a doctor’s note to excuse an absence.  I am fortunate to have insurance and have a family doctor I can turn to.  Even so, it may require a $20 co-pay for a visit before a doctor will be willing to write a letter, which may mean a $20 fee for a note to excuse an absence for what I know is a cold with a mild fever.  Since I’m following our school’s procedures of keeping a child home when sick, I’ll need to do this if I think she might be sick for even five days total per year.  This is doable for me, if I’m worried about the situation.  However, for a family in a harder economic situation, that $20 co-pay can be onerous.  But that’s assuming a family has a regular doctor and has insurance beyond catastrophic coverage only.  I’m certain that not all families in our school district do, with more than half of the children in our county living in poverty (http://www.mlive.com/news/jackson/index.ssf/2012/01/report_more_jackson_county_chi.html).  As you well know, most of our elementary schools qualified for the federal program supplying free school lunches for our children based on the poverty rates of our area. 

What we are creating, therefore, is a system wherein wealthier students when they get sick are less likely to be considered truant and poorer children are more likely to be considered truant, based not on their real truancy rates, but based on their access to affordable medical care.  The schools need to be helping address income inequality between our students, not creating further income inequality.

Beyond issues of class, however, this system represents a misuse of the medical system and a lack of respect for the judgment of parents.  To return to my own child’s situation, we’re told we’re supposed to keep children home if they have any fever.  However, when I keep my child home with a sniffle and a temperature that’s up one or two degrees, as I have done today, I therefore also need to call my child’s doctor and get a note from her.  In the past, the doctor has told us with cold-like symptoms and a very mild fever there’s no need for the child to see a doctor unless the condition persists beyond a couple of days.  I therefore know that there’s no need, other than the JPS policy, to seek a medical professional’s advice.  Today we called the doctor, anyway, to try to meet the policy demands.  However, we haven’t received a call back yet.  Sometimes they’ve been willing to provide a note for school without seeing her and, really, what does that prove, except that we have a good relationship with our doctor?  If they won’t write a note for today without seeing her, I’ll need for her to see the doctor, in order to prove she was sick.  My daughter may be well tomorrow, but I would need to pull her out of school tomorrow in order to get the note to excuse the first day’s absence.  (The note would probably then say that my child’s absence wasn’t excused, because she was fine by the second day.)  So now my child would have been out for one and a half days when one day would have sufficed, wasting the doctor’s time, my time, and my child’s time, just because of a poor policy.  Frankly, I’m unwilling to pull my child out of school for an unnecessary doctor’s appointment, because school is more important to me than your attendance policy.  So if this happens for eight days per year, my child will probably be referred to a truant officer for early truancy intervention.  My hope is that if this happens, “early truancy intervention” is something which focuses on telling other parents to keep their children home when they’re sick so that my child can catch fewer colds and miss fewer days, or helps set up free clinics for parents without insurance!  Of course, you can see that we’re caught it a Catch-22.

To not accept my word that my child has a mild fever and a sniffle is to disrespect my judgment as a parent, one who does care about my child’s medical status and knows that a doctor visit is not necessary.  To have to pursue it with a reluctant physician, as well, is a misuse of the medical establishment, and disrespectful to our physician, as well. 

If you all think back to the days when you were a child, and were home sick with a mild cold, you’ll remember that your parent probably called the school and told them you were sick, and that was the end of the matter.  There should be a way to continue to do this.  Be creative.  While the occasional problem of a parent keeping a child out of school more for other reasons may exist, there are ways to address this without creating a burdensome system with a difficult financial cost to the parents to it. 

Thank you for considering my argument.  I hope I have managed to convey my issue respectfully, although this policy frustrates me every time my child has been home sick.  I understand not excusing a family vacation, or even a trip to the dentist, but if you want parents to keep sick children home, as I know you do, I hope you will consider making it easier for us to do so. 

Sincerely,
Cynthia L. Landrum
Parent
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Nickel and Dimed in Bivocational Ministry

By: Cynthia L. Landrum
In the last week or two, I've been hearing a lot of talk about "bivocational ministry" as the potential saving model for sustainability in our movement.  The subject has come up in a number of collegial conversations, and Scott Wells introduces the subject in a recent post

First of all, as far as I can see "bivocational ministry" is just a fancy term for "part-time ministry" that makes it sound like something the minister wants because they have some other wonderful job they don't want to give up.

What are the problems with bivocational ministry?  It can be a great choice if:
  • You're independently wealthy
  • You're a second-career minister with a lucrative first profession
  • You have a spouse with a good income
On the other hand, it's not so great if:
  •  You're a first-career minister
  • You're not independently wealthy
  • You don't have a spouse with a good income
I was a part-time minister for a couple of years.  You could call me "bivocational" since I had a second part-time job.  As a first-career minister, I don't have a professional practice in psychology to make up a second job.  What I have is an M.A. in English, and so I taught adjunct at a community college.  I continue to do that now, even though I'm in full-time ministry.  But I taught enough during my 3/4-time ministry to make up 1/4 of my income through college teaching.  And I gave up that life as quickly as I could to go into full-time ministry.  Why?

Part-time work in this country usually comes without benefits.  As a 3/4-time minister, I therefore threw much of my total cost of ministry (TCM) into benefits.  I had a benefit package that looked much like a full-time ministers, but with a tiny salary attached to it.  The other 1/4-time job would make up some of the income difference, but not all of it.  Full-time work, because of the benefit balance piece, pays better than two part-time jobs.  Esssentially, you see, I was paying for 1/4 of my benefits that wouldn't be part of a balanced 3/4-time job out of salary.  And adjunct salary being what it is, it wasn't equivalent to 1/4 of a professional salary.

This leads to my second point: part-time employment is usually under-paid.  Even if the minister isn't underpaid in their half-time ministry, their other half-time job probably is underpaid, especially if this is a first-career minister.  As you find in ministry, being well-trained for ministry doesn't exactly put you on the top of the market for non-ministry jobs out there.

And part-time ministry is overworked.  Full-time ministers in our movement often get one Sunday a month off.  Most half-time ministers seem to get two Sundays a month off.  And 3/4-time ministers get one Sunday a month off.  That's what I find as I talk to my part-time colleagues.  So a 3/4-time minister is often doing full-time ministry for 3/4 of the money.  And since full-time ministry is often a job and a half at full-time pay, that's even worse.

I left part-time ministry for health reasons: I was pregnant.  And I had good health care through my ministry profession.  I probably could've gotten maternity leave (although this was a debate with the congregation, which is another story).  But an adjunct professor gets no paid maternity leave.  So essentially getting pregnant meant I would lose 1/4 of my income at the same time as I gained 1/3 of my family.  That math didn't look good or sustainable to me.  And the idea of working as much as I was working with a baby also didn't sit well.  And so I found myself in search and pregnant at the same time. 

For me, bivocational ministry looks like a ministry model to attract older and wealthier ministers.  It looks like an even more classist ministry.  And it looks like a future that if we pursue it will lose a lot of ministers who would add a lot to our movement, but who simply can't afford the luxury of part-time work.

In a movement that's talking about how work should be sustainable for a family, let's quit the talk of bivocational ministry as our future fix, and keep thinking about how to make a sustainable ministry sustainable for congregations as well.  It's a challenge, but if we don't meet this challenge we aren't living our faith.
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Study/Action Issues & Vaginas

By: Cynthia L. Landrum
Tomorrow we vote on what Study/Action issue to adopt for 2012-2016, and I haven't made up my mind yet which one I'm voting for.  I talked with a proponent of "CSAI 1 - Climate Action and Adaptation Plans: Why Greenhouse Gases and their Effects Matter to Us" today, who points out that if we don't save the earth, none of these other issues will matter.  Well, yeah.  That's a point.  And he also points out that some of the other issues are related to this one, particularly "CSAI 2 - Families, Population, and the Environment."  I've also seen that a lot of people I know are walking around wearing anti-slavery buttons and that there seems to be a lot of support for "CSAI 5 - Ending Slavery."  The advocate for CSAI 1 asked me, "Well, what is your congregation engaged in?"  We're engaged in all these issues to some extent.  Our JXN Community Forum series has often engaged in environmental issues.  Our members are individually involved in the Occupy movement, and might be very interested in "CSAI 4 - Exploring Class Barriers."  But what immediately came to mind is that our church has voted for Planned Parenthood every year for the last several years as one of the local agencies to donate to, and I've seen our members be strong advocates for that organization.  And it's going to be hard to convince this feminist that, with everything going on in my home state, that I shouldn't vote for, "CSAI 3 - Reproductive Justice: Expanding Our Social Justice Calling."  I stopped at the booth for the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice today.  I said to the woman there, "I'm from Michigan."  And she gave me a look of pity and said, "Vagina! Vagina!"  (This may be a somewhat exaggerated story, induced by heat, but that's the way I remember it right now.  My apologies to the lovely RCRC woman if I've exaggerated her response.)

Things are going crazy in Michigan, folks.  Our legislators are considering severe anti-abortion legislation.  Our women representatives are being barred from speaking in the house because of saying things like the word "vagina."   This issue is alive and serious in the state of Michigan.  We're turning anatomical terms into dirty words that can't be spoken aloud, and the effect is the silencing of women on women's issues.  How many women got to speak to the House Health Policy Committee at their hearing of the bill?  None--three men only, although Rev. Jeff Liebmann did a fabulous job.

This morning at the Meadville/Lombard alumni breakfast, we heard, as always, memories from ministers who graduated 25 and 50 years ago.  The minister from 50 years ago couldn't be there in person, but sent his memories in writing.  He talked about creating an organization of ministers to help pastor to women and help them connect to illegal abortion providers, so that they could have safe abortions in the time before Roe vs. Wade.

I don't want to have to do that ministry--but I might have to in Michigan soon, if this trend holds.

So my mind isn't made up about the CSAIs--but I sure know what's resonating right now.  We're here talking about immigration, but for the first part of the week, my heart was still on the Michigan capitol steps, where the Vagina Monologues were taking place Monday evening. 
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