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This chapter examines a truancy reduction initiative in the Berkeley County School District (BCSD), located near coastal South Carolina (SC). It discusses the process of community collaboration, program design and evaluation, and the use of school social workers as team members for program intervention. Additionally, it provides sample forms and examples that offer a model for a truancy reduction program.

This chapter examines several reasons for the existence of the knowledge—practice gap; a gap between the practice choices of school social workers, and research on school-based prevention and intervention as well as contemporary education models. It presents three plausible explanations for the knowledge—practice gap: (1) lack of practitioner familiarity with the knowledge base; (2) barriers to implementing principles and specific empirically supported treatments (ESTs) emerging from the knowledge base, and (3) a privileging of practice wisdom over empirical research, resulting in a rejection of current school-based research. It introduces the evidence-informed practice (EIP) process that has been proposed in social work and other disciplines to address the research—practice gap. While EIP has intuitive appeal, it has also received much criticism from the practice community. These criticisms, many of which are legitimate, have undoubtedly contributed to the slow embracing of EIP in practice.

This chapter argues that evidence-informed school social work practitioners adopt a process of lifelong learning that involves regularly posing questions of direct practical importance to clients; engaging in a search for the best available evidence privileging the school-based prevention and intervention research and contemporary education frameworks; and taking appropriate action in a transparent collaboration that is in concert with children's, teachers', and parents' goals and preferences. Many times, this will involve deciding with them to implement the most empirically validated treatment available, but only after the school social worker and child, teacher, or parent have joined in the evidence-informed practice (EIP) process outlined in this chapter.

This chapter discusses problems identifying and reporting truancy and gives recommendations for ways to solve these problems. Additionally, the role of support staff in facilitating quality attendance data collection and analysis is discussed. It is argued that high-quality systems to monitor student attendance are essential to help reduce truancy. It is important for school social workers to take on the task of helping their schools develop and to implement effective attendance-monitoring systems so that they can intervene early before students fall behind academically and develop chronic attendance problems.

This chapter reviews recent policies on truancy data and gives a summary of how each state defines truancy. It also illustrates the importance of school social workers' understanding policies regarding truancy and its impact on families. Overall, the definitions for truancy and habitual truancy vary from state to state and sometimes vary within each state (school district to school district). The National Cooperative Education Statistics System National Forum on Education Statistics, Truancy Working Group, decided that it is not possible at this time to have a uniform definition of truancy at the national level. Every school has an attendance policy; however, it may be unclear what is required from the student and parent. School social workers need to help the families in their schools understand the importance of good school attendance and the consequences for truancy. In some states support staff may need to advocate to their elected officials to make state laws on truancy more explicit and more accessible.