On school days, Tam Chau, a 15-year-old eighth-grader at Mercer Middle School, wakes up to his alarm at 7 a.m. Then he reaches over, turns it off, and goes back to sleep. His mother, Tuyen, sometimes tries to rouse him, but he doesn't usually listen. When Tam finally manages to get out of bed, he gets dressed, brushes his teeth in the bathroom of the Yesler Terrace apartment that he shares with his mother and 9-year-old brother, and walks down the block to catch the bus to school. If he gets to school on time, which he estimates he does twice a week, he eats a publicly subsidized free breakfast there.
Harley Soltes
School ain't cool for Tam Chau and his crew: (from left) Chau, Phi Dinh, Johnson Pham, and Duc Huynh.
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Once the school day gets going, Tam meets up with his friends and decides whether or not to skip. The answer is usually yes, at which point they typically head downtown to GameWorks, where they'll spend the rest of the day playing Maximum Tune 2 or Dance Dance Revolution. When Tam tires of the video arcade, he goes over to a friend's house, where he'll often spend the night. His mother, a Vietnamese refugee who speaks little English, typically has no idea where he is or what he's doing.
Tam, a lanky boy whose wardrobe is anchored by North Face jackets and Air Force Ones, was a decent, if unspectacular, student through elementary school. He even won a reading award in fifth grade. But once he hit sixth grade at Mercer, school got "boring," and he started hanging out with a group of boys who skipped school. Tam estimates that he missed more than 30 days that year, a trend that continued into seventh grade. That behavior eventually landed him in truancy court, to which he has returned countless times for missing more school.
The guidance counselors at Mercer describe Tam as a nice, smart boy with good intentions. (Despite all of the missed school, he managed to pass the WASL.) He doesn't talk back to his teachers or get in fights. For some reason, however, he just can't be bothered to attend school with any regularity. "His education pretty much stopped in sixth grade," says Marion Howard, a guidance counselor at Mercer. "It's been a two-year struggle since then. He occasionally shows up for a day here, a day there, but that's not an education."
Last fall, Tam was hanging out at a friend's house one evening when someone knocked on the door. Tam, then 14, walked into the living room and, to his surprise, found two police officers.
"Who are you?" one of the officers asked him.
"I'm Tam," he replied.
"Do you know you have a warrant out on you?"
"No."
Tam considered running, but thought about it too long. The officers handcuffed him, walked him out of the house and into their squad car, and drove him straight to a juvenile detention facility a short distance from his home. There, Tam changed out of his clothes and into a green jumpsuit. The officers walked him past the violent offenders and put him in his cell upstairs.
Not obeying the truancy court's orders was Tam's offense, which subsequently generated a warrant for his arrest. Unlike the other youths in detention, many of whom had hurt, robbed, or stolen from people, Tam spent the weekend as an inmate of the King County juvenile correctional system simply because he had not gone to school.
A few months later, Tam missed another court date and got another warrant. He tried to hide from the police, but they found him after a couple of weeks at another friend's house while he was cooking noodles. Despite all the court appearances and detentions, Tam continues to skip school. "Why can't they just drop me out?" he says. "What's the big deal? They've already tried [to help me] once. Why keep trying?"
Tam is just one of hundreds of King County students who have been jailed for missing school; since 1997, the county has jailed truant youths 974 times. The laws that govern truancy in Washington are collectively known as the Becca Bill, named after Rebecca Hedman. Abused by her biological mother, Rebecca was placed with a foster family in Tacoma, where, despite her foster parents' efforts, she became a drug addict who supported her habit by working as a prostitute. She ran away from a residential drug-treatment center three times, and eventually ended up walking the streets of Spokane. In 1993, Becca's 13-year-old body was found on the bank of the Spokane River, beaten to death.
Public outcry led to the creation of a set of laws designed to assist parents with uncontrollable children. In 1995, the state Legislature signed the Becca Bill into law, offering parents, with the help of the court system, more control over disobedient, runaway, and at-risk children. Recognizing truancy as an indicator for future problems, lawmakers extended the Becca Bill to cover school attendance, too.
"When you get serious about truancy, you can have a huge impact on juvenile crime," says Ken Seeley, president of the Colorado Foundation for Families and Children, which recently completed an evaluation of several city and county truancy programs, including King County's. Indeed, since the establishment of the Becca Bill, King County's juvenile arrest rate has dropped by nearly a third.
