BATON ROUGE – Questions have been raised after a 14-year-old was killed in Baton Rouge on Thursday, the first day of school.

The Family and Youth Service Center says it tries to keep every child in school but has extremely limited resources to track truancy. According to the East Baton Rouge Parish School Board, truancy is absence from class or school for any part of an hour or day without permission from home or school.

The Family and Youth Service Center works with a single sheriff’s deputy to investigate reports of school-age children who are absent from school during school hours. She deals with issues that go far beyond rebellious young people who skip school. Sometimes it’s difficult for them to get to school because they’re homeless, making their lives unsafe and chaotic.

“For many of the students and families involved in our program, housing is a major issue,” said Jennie Ponder, director of the Truancy Assessment and Service Center. “More homeless students mean more kids struggling to get to school.”

Ponder said frequent absences from school are not only a warning sign of school dropouts, but are also linked to juvenile delinquency.

“The goal is to get the child back in school, but more importantly, to provide the child with a positive experience in school,” Ponder said.

Travez Washington was killed in a shooting Thursday, the day the new school year began in East Baton Rouge Parish Schools. Neighbors said he had not attended school.

Ponder said the authorities’ limited ability to intervene meant that many children did not get the help they needed, with hundreds of young people going to the centre each semester.

“Many of the students we deal with who are skipping school are intergenerational, just like there is intergenerational poverty, intergenerational crime, and any lack of education. We want to change that,” Ponder said. “The first step in a child’s journey is to be there for the child, and that’s the key, and we go from there.”