Last year, Mayor Bloomberg spearheaded the Mayoral Interagency Task Force, which combats truancy and chronic absenteeism at city schools, after a report that nearly 20 percent of city elementary school students missed one month of school or more in recent years. But it seems that the program hasn't had quite the desired effects as Bloomberg would have liked. So he's decided to step up his campaign with a surefire way to reach teens: Through the celebrities they idolize. Spare the rod, spoil the celebrity cameo appearance?
Truant students at certain schools will now be receiving prerecorded telephone calls to wake-the-hell-up from celebrities such as Magic Johnson, Mets SS Jose Reyes, R&B superstar Trey Songz or BET host Terrence J. The city announced the new initiative WakeUp NYC, that enlists celebrities to place automated phone calls to chronically absent students at 25 schools. The program will initially focus on 6,500 students who have been marked because they have been absent for 10 or more school days in a single year.
If the program is successful, the plan is to expand it citywide, where according to the Times, roughly 250,000 students miss at least one month of school in a given year. It's bad enough that the chronic absenteeism rate remained above 40 percent in seven high schools in the program. If only they could have convinced the celeb's to record absurdly specific messages for the kids, we may have been tempted to pull a 21 Jump Street.
