Letter to the editor: What to do about PPS absenteeism crisis?
Share this post:
Colin McNickle wrote an excellent column on the shocking, to some, absenteeism in Pittsburgh Public Schools (“PPS’ continuing chronic absenteeism crisis,” Jan. 18, TribLive). I’m not shocked as much, perhaps as a retired teacher and brother of a retired PPS administrator, who saw the absenteeism firsthand. But this should shock the general public, taxpayers, even as our feckless politicians were well aware of this.
Yet the purpose of my letter is to pose the question, What were they thinking? — the “they” being PPS leaders. It would be low-hanging fruit to blame absenteeism on outright sloth, access to the public welfare trough, so no need for school and then by some in response, the old standby cries of racism, legacy of racism, institutional marginalization of the lower class, white and Black, our own “Hillbilly Elegy.”
Without writing off completely these explanations, although I think they need to be shelved except for more esoteric, removed individuals, i.e., pious liberals, to ruminate.
“What were they thinking?” about this ongoing, relentless, chronic absenteeism crisis. We need answers, solutions and to dump the trite, irrelevant answers. I don’t have any answers and must rely on serious sources to respond; who, what, when, where, why and how, basic questions about the absentees.
The bigger issue: Two ways to ensure poverty, economic minimal subsidence, are single mothers plus absentee, unacknowledged fathers and no, or insignificant, education. How much of the first affects school absenteeism? We already know the consequences of the second.
D’Anthony Kennedy
Plum