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Evaluation of a Truancy Reduction Program in Nashville, Tennessee, 1998-2000

Metadata Updated: November 28, 2023

The Metropolitan Development and Housing Agency in Nashville, Tennessee, received a National Institute of Justice grant to study the effectiveness of Nashville's Juvenile Court Truancy Reduction Program (TRP). The goals of the TRP were to increase attendance and to get children safely to and from school. While habitual truancy, also referred to as chronic absenteeism, was legally defined under the Juvenile Offender Act of the State of Tennessee as five or more aggregate, unexcused absences in the course of a school year, the TRP operationally defined students at risk of truancy as those who had three unexcused absences in a school year. The intent of TRP was to intervene before the student was adjudicated habitually truant, so once a student had a third unexcused absence, the child was placed on the TRP caseload. TRP staff would then intervene with a variety of services, including home visits, community advisory boards, a suspension school, and a summer program. The evaluation study was designed to test the following hypotheses: (1) students who participated in TRP would increase their attendance rates, and (2) students who participated in TRP and other community services that were part of the Public Housing Drug Elimination Program network would increase their attendance rates at higher rates than students who participated in TRP alone. The targeted population for this study consisted of child and youth residents from five of the six public housing communities that participated in TRP. These communities also represented the public housing communities with the highest crime rates in Nashville, and included five of the eight total family public housing developments there. All kindergarten through 8th-grade students from the targeted communities who began participating in TRP during the 1998-1999 or 1999-2000 school years were included in the study. The TRP served over 400 kindergarten through 8th-grade students during the two school years included in this study. Students who had all of the required data elements were included in the analyses. Required data elements included TRP entry date and school entry and exit dates. Students also had to have begun TRP during the study period. Variables include students' grade, gender, race, age, school enrollment date, TRP program entry date, bus eligibility, other program participation, attendance records for every school day during the two years of the study, and aggregated counts of attendance and truant behavior.

Access & Use Information

Public: This dataset is intended for public access and use. License: us-pd

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Dates

Metadata Created Date August 18, 2021
Metadata Updated Date November 28, 2023

Metadata Source

Harvested from DOJ JSON

Additional Metadata

Resource Type Dataset
Metadata Created Date August 18, 2021
Metadata Updated Date November 28, 2023
Publisher National Institute of Justice
Maintainer
Identifier 3588
Data First Published 2002-09-03T00:00:00
Language eng
Data Last Modified 2005-11-04T00:00:00
Public Access Level public
Bureau Code 011:21
Metadata Context https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.jsonld
Metadata Catalog ID https://www.justice.gov/data.json
Schema Version https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema
Catalog Describedby https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.json
Harvest Object Id b9210749-e60d-4118-9598-935f4b0dc7e5
Harvest Source Id 3290e90a-116f-42fc-86ac-e65521ef3b68
Harvest Source Title DOJ JSON
License http://www.usa.gov/publicdomain/label/1.0/
Program Code 011:060
Publisher Hierarchy Office of Justice Programs > National Institute of Justice
Source Datajson Identifier True
Source Hash 935c9d0b7ae774c05e66e8169b19b22436e33f5602d7c30ba70bb4ea82e09c9e
Source Schema Version 1.1

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