Mission

The Truancy Intervention Project's mission is to increase student attendance and opportunities for success through legal and family advocacy.

What We Do

Truant behavior is an early indicator of potential trouble to come in a young person's life. Missing more than ten days of school in a single year - the legal definition of truancy in Georgia - is linked to school failure, lower literacy rates, poverty, crime, teen pregnancy, and a need for public assistance. Recognizing the need to address truant behavior before its negative consequences set in, the Truancy Intervention Project (TIP) was created in late 1991 to mitigate truancy and chronic absenteeism in Fulton County.

Overall, TIP's goal is to uncover and address the root causes of the child's absenteeism. These root causes often include mental health issues, learning disabilities, transportation difficulties, lack of adequate clothing, and a disruptive home environment, among others. By connecting children and their families to appropriate community resources, TIP staff and volunteers help address the causes of the child's absences and get their school attendance back on track. Now in our 28th year, TIP has served almost 11,000 students through robust and intensive programming that has an overall 86.5% success rate of students returning to school with no further contact with juvenile court after participating in our program.