A Short Commentary

By Larry Cohen c 2026

A long-time friend of mine moved from my area here in Central New York State to the Southern Tier of the state, Vestal, NY, just outside of Binghamton, where his wife worked as a high school social worker. One of her main tasks as a social worker was to visit the families of students who were constantly truant.

According to her, there were two clues that would give her a “heads up” on the problem as soon as she would enter the home of the truant student. The first one was counting the empty pizza boxes in the trash. If she saw a large pile of empty pizza boxes (and it was not the Monday after the Super Bowl), she would immediately understand that there were serious problems in the meal preparation, or lack thereof, in this household. Irregular meal preparation, or where a family lives on takeout pizza, is not a good sign.

Secondly, the number of parents who smoked cigarettes was in direct proportion to the behavior problems the student would have when the student actually attended classes. She said that it was a logarithmic problem. She explained that if one parent smoked, then the student would have X number of problems. But, if both parents smoked instead of having x + x problems, the number was squared. To put this in real numbers, 1=1 =2, but 2 to the 2nd power would be 4.

She is now retired and works for a nearby school district in the Binghamton area on a per diem basis. However, all of this made me think that these students, who are the children of these kinds of parents, do not stop misbehaving as soon as they leave school. Their behavior affects all of us should we run into them on the road, in a shopping center, or any other public place. But, getting back to our high school teachers, I think there should be no light between the social workers and the high school teaching staff since the teachers have to deal with these students on a daily basis. And, as they say, forewarned is forearmed.