Last week, Reporter Clayton Franke’s story on the Silver Rail shooter started with the basic premise of, ‘why wasn’t this kid in school?’ We wanted to know when the student attended Bend-La Pine Schools, when he did not and what happened in between, in some attempt to understand more about the 16-year-old and why he did what he did. Through that reporting, we thought, perhaps we could begin to understand what community supports exist, where the gaps are and how the system could have done better to ensure that no kid of his age drops out of the school system without caring people coming to check on him.
What we found should concern people — not just for how it pertains to the school shooter and the threat of something like this happening again with another young person, but how it pertains to Oregon’s overall approach to student attendance, and consequently, student success.
In 2021, lawmakers opted to do away with the truancy laws that meant that when a student stops going to school, a truancy officer or some other authority would show up to check in.
Franke’s reporting found that within the Bend-La Pine Schools district, and public-school districts statewide, districts are required to do only the most basic of check-ups on a student who is drifting away from school. When a student stops going to school, district policy requires them to check on the student two times in the 10 days before the student is dropped from the district. Due to rules around per-student funding, districts must drop students after 10 days. Keeping them on the rolls would mean the district is continuing to get state funding for a student who is no longer there.
In this line of thinking, students are a line item with a price tag attached — not struggling kids who may need more than 10 days for someone to drop them a lifeline.
While they would not share specific details about the former special education student turned deadly shooter, Bend-La Pine Schools tells us they often do more than the required two check-ins. But that’s about all they can do, they said.
So what happens after that?
In most of Oregon, the answer is “not much.”
And this is where we feel an action item for next year’s crop of leaders in the Oregon State Legislative Assembly should begin. In 2021, lawmakers opted to do away with the truancy laws that meant that when a student stops going to school, a truancy officer or some other authority would show up to check in and perhaps offer warnings or citations to the adults in the home to get the student back to school. Lawmakers eschewed that practice for fear it would disproportionally affect Black and brown students, putting them on the path to more involvement in the justice system.
But one county, Malheur County, opted to pass its own local ordinance around student truancy in 2023. Since then, it’s issued just one fine, the Oregon Journalism Project reported. Judges instead tended to prescribe parenting classes or mental health referrals, rather than fines, OJP reported. The County now boasts the highest attendance rates in the state. In other words, truancy laws have become a safety net that helps catch kids who may otherwise struggle alone.
It is not justice to disproportionally target Black and brown kids and put them on a path into the justice system; but neither is it justice to let kids drift away with no support, simply because we don’t want them to end up incarcerated later on.
Oregon schools have an attendance problem that has been widely reported. School attendance rates have ticked slightly upward over the past several years, but the state still outpaces the national average by a wide margin, with 33.5% of students designated as chronically absent during the 2024-25 school year, compared to a national average of 23.5%.
As those abysmal rates, and the story of the recent shooter reveal, Oregon needs more accountability for parents and families after their children disappear from school. If you don’t want to label that accountability “truancy,” then call it something else. But we can’t let kids simply drift away.
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