Since just over 60 percent of U.S. school districts implement court diversion programs to address chronic unexcused absenteeism, but the effectiveness of these programs is not known, the current study evaluated whether the Truancy Intervention Program (TIP) improved the school attendance of students in grades 7-10 in a metropolitan county in the Midwestern United States.
Similar to most truancy court diversion programs, TIP consisted of three increasingly intrusive steps: (1) a parent meeting, (2) a hearing to develop an attendance contract, and (3) a petition to juvenile court. The intervention group consisted of students from the intervention county who had been referred to TIP between 2006 and 2009. The comparison group was drawn from a contiguous, same-sized, and socio-demographically similar county that petitioned truant students directly to court. To construct the comparison group, multi-level matching procedures were applied to linked, individual-level administrative data from eight state and local agencies for all public-school students in the state between 2004 and 2015. Using the matched samples, difference-in-differences analyses were conducted to identify program effects for two intervention groups: all students referred to TIP and students whose family participated in the group parent meeting. In the 4 years after the intervention, the intervention groups had similar or slightly lower attendance than the comparison groups; however, most coefficients were not statistically significant, and there was no consistent pattern of effects across different samples and different specifications of the intervention. This pattern of findings was not sufficiently robust to conclude that the program influenced school attendance. (publisher abstract modified)