The car wouldn't start. We couldn't find his shoes. The alarm never went off. The alarm's broken. We don't have the money to buy a new alarm clock.

"It's A-to-Z why kids are absent," said Donna Cook, a pupil personnel worker (PPW) in the Howard County school system whose many duties include curbing chronic absence.

"Sometimes the stories will break you heart, sometimes they'll make you angry. One of the biggest challenges for me in this job is bringing understanding and compassion to it and trying to reserve judgment."

But when children consistently miss school - whether because of their apathy or their parents' - it requires more than compassion. It demands intervention.

Howard County, which has seen a steady rise in truancy during the past three years, has put together a pilot program that is based on one developed in Baltimore County and designed to cut absenteeism before it gets out of control. It will make its debut at four test schools as needed in the coming months: Deep Run Elementary, Waterloo Elementary, Mayfield Woods Middle and Long Reach High.

The multiagency effort calls on volunteers, the Sheriff's Department, the Department of Aging, the state's attorneys office, the Mental Health Authority and the Department of Social Services.

It's a sort of last-ditch effort to thwart ditching.

"Filing criminal charges in court is the next step," said Rachel Leasure, another PPW who is helping implement the program, called Project Attend.

Maryland's Compulsory Attendance Law requires children ages 5 to 16 to attend public school regularly. Parents are held responsible for illegal absences and can face hefty fines or jail time.

"If parents fail to follow recommendations, that's when criminal charges come in to play," said State's Attorney Marna L. McLendon.

The first step in the process is identifying frequent unlawfully absent students who have failed to respond to other methods to improve attendance. Their parents are sent a letter from the state's attorney's office (delivered by a county police officer) summoning them to an informal hearing to be held at the District Courthouse.

Once there, the families and the interested agencies will discuss the reasons for absence and try to offer support. A senior volunteer, recruited from the Department of Aging, is assigned to the child as a caseworker to monitor attendance. The volunteer's job is to call students and attendance offices daily to ensure the child is in school.

"Education is certainly the key to what happens to you in your adult life," said Laverne Bahel, one of three volunteers who have enlisted in Howard. "If it's thwarted at an early age, you're lost."

Habitual truancy - defined in part by the state as unlawful absence for 20 percent or more of school days - in Howard has climbed from 117 cases in the 1998-1999 school year to 537 cases last school year.

Part of the increase can be attributed to the rise in enrollment and better recordkeeping, said Pam Blackwell, the school system's student services coordinator. But the numbers were startling enough to spur Blackwell to action.

She and McLendon developed a work group in April last year and instructed it to look at ways to cut cutting and the trials that stem from it (charges were lodged against six families in the past two years; three were prosecuted and convicted).

After examining programs from across the country, the work group settled on Baltimore County's Project Attend largely because it had been shown to be effective and met state laws.

The program started in 1995 (and was adopted by Anne Arundel County in 1998) has served more than 3,000 students since then, improving the county's attendance rate by a full 4 to 5 percentage points, said Vivian Ferguson, Baltimore County schools' coordinator of pupil personnel services.

"This is a real team approach to help resolve chronic absenteeism," Ferguson said. "That's the real benefit."

Research has shown chronic truancy to be a precursor to more serious offenses, McLendon said, and often the absenteeism stems from other troubles at home or in the school.

Administrators hope that the informal hearings and the volunteers, who will keep detailed records, can help unearth the problems so they can work toward a solution.

"That's why this [Project Attend is] going to be so critical," Blackwell said. "The whole truancy thing is really an effort on all of our parts. It's not just the school's problem, but the community's and the family's. All three of us working together can help solve it."