Truancy officer Tony Stark sits in his car in a central Las Vegas neighborhood, talking to a student who was off campus last week. Photo by John Locher.

To reduce dropout rates, the Clark County School District is seeking legislative muscle that would strengthen state laws to penalize truant students and their parents.

At the core of a proposed bill that would go before the 2007 Legislature are provisions that include an increase in the mandatory fines given to parents of truant students, an increase in community service hours that truant students must perform and a delay in the issuance of a driver's license for truant students eligible for that rite of passage.

With the more serious consequences for truant students, the nation's fifth-largest district seeks $400,000 in funding to hire four officials during a two-year pilot program at eight middle schools. They would track truants, making daily contact with them.

District officials said the bill should increase graduation rates while decreasing dropout rates.

But at least one official in Southern Nevada's juvenile court system said he's concerned that the proposed legislation would put too much of the enforcement burden on a court system that is already heavily taxed.

Craig Kadlub, the district's director of government affairs, said the issue is not about penalizing students and parents. "Our goal is not to be punitive as much as it is to simply keep kids in school," Kadlub said.

The district's dropout rate for the 2004-05 school year was 6.8 percent, compared with 7.6 percent the previous school year.

The district's bill proposal requires parents to pay a $100 fine if their child is deemed truant by the juvenile courts a first time. State law calls for parents of students under the same circumstances to pay no more than $100.

First-time truants also would be made to perform 16 hours of community service, double the eight hours currently required by state law. The bill also calls for first-time truants to have their driver's license suspended for at least 90 days. State law now requires a minimum 30-day suspension. The district's proposal goes on to require harsher penalties for students who have been deemed habitual truants.

The proposed bill was one of five approved by the School Board during a meeting on Aug. 24.

Kadlub said district students who are truant rarely see a judge.

"Sometimes principals and deans get frustrated because when they do turn in truancy referrals, most of the time nothing happens," Kadlub said. "Students don't go before a judge."

During the 2005-06 school year, 926 students were issued citations by the district for being truant for three or more days in the year. Only 80 of those students stepped into a juvenile courtroom.

But Fritz Reese, assistant director of the Department of Clark County Juvenile Justice Services, said it's not necessarily bad news that most truant students don't go before a judge. He said juvenile courts give truants and their parents three warnings to let them know that if the student's school attendance doesn't improve, they'll have to appear in court. Court-assigned truant officers contact the student and the parents on the second warning and try to ensure that the student will be in the classroom.

"A lot of the times, those letters alone make parents say, 'Hey, why haven't you gone back to school?'" Reese said.

Reese said heavily burdened juvenile courts issued 531 citations between Jan. 4 and May 18 to truant students along with accompanying letters to their parents warning them of the possibility of a court date if the problems persisted.

Though Reese is not opposed to the district's bill, he said the court system is inundated with other, more serious juvenile offenses.

"I don't believe the court and juvenile justice system should take sole responsibility of truants," Reese said. "It's a collective process between the courts, the district and the community. ... We don't want to clog up the courts any more than they already are."

The school system has about 20 truant officers. Each is assigned about 25 schools in a particular zone. The officers' responsibilities include meeting with the parents of truant students and sometimes transporting students from their homes to their school.

But the district's funding proposal seeks additional personnel, called student success advocates, to handle the truancy problem. Unlike truancy officers, the four advocates the district is seeking for the pilot program will work only at two middle schools each. The district is hoping that having those advocates focus only on two schools will result in tangible statistics indicating decreased truancy at the schools.

The $400,000 the district is seeking would cover the salary and benefits of the four advocates during a two-year period.

Edward Goldman, associate superintendent of the district's Education Services Department, said the district lacks truancy officials, adding that the pilot program should be a solid indicator to determine whether having more student success advocates in the school system would reduce the truancy problem.

He said the district now has only about five officials with the title of student success advocate.

"It's a nice thing to have," Goldman said. "But it's obviously expensive. We'll see if they're effective."