(MOBILE, Ala.) - Riding around the midtown streets that surround Murphy High School - attendance officer Lewis Autrey is checking to see if any students have decided to skip class... even stopping by the nearby Subway to see if any went out for lunch.
"Try to ride around the block before I go in," Autrey explains.
But the few minutes he's able to do this is by no means what his job entails on a day to day basis. Autrey, like the other eight attendance officers, has to keep track of thousands of children at the 8-10 school they're assigned to. Autrey says it's rare he's at the mall tracking down truant kids down.
Supervisor Curt Belson says the public may have the wrong idea of what attendance officers do. He says while in the past they may have sought out kids and hauled them back to campus. Today, they spend most of their time tracking students' missed days and contacting parents to pinpoint what the problem is.
Like this morning's meeting with at-risk students and their parents to warn them that criminal action could come if they missed any more school.
