Recollections of a Truant Officer

“Recollections of a Truant Officer” is a collection of on the job anecdotes. It traces the journey of a classroom teacher in the N.Y.C. Public schools in the inner city. He notices that some of his absent students live on the same block as the school. He decides to visit them during his lunch period. While entering a building, he is interrupted by a man who explains it is job to visit and determine why students are truanting from school. He is an Attendance Teacher, often known as a Truant Officer. He encourages this young teacher, the author, to take the examination and join the ranks of Truant Officers who do a noble but sometimes thankless job. Besides the myriad family, social and monetary problems that work against these children, often the school and its teachers are hostile to their return. They are viewed as troublemakers who lack educational and social skills due to their truancy, and thus need more time and attention from the already beleaguered staff. // These accounts or recollections are at once amusing, heartening, empathetic and mostly illuminating. They tell of the hardships and frustrations of both the families being serviced and the Attendance Teachers who give aid as advocates for the children involved. // You will walk away with an appreciation for this difficult and little know or understood profession.