Students with high rates of absenteeism in a wealthy Copenhagen neighborhood have begun to get surprising house calls from social workers as a way to increase attendance, Agence France-Presse reported.
The Denmark welfare state has since been bombarded with complaints of intrusiveness.
"There have been conflicts, but the people we've sent out are trained to handle situations like that. Of course there's been resistance," Barbro Lundqvist, a social worker told AFP.
According to AFP, after a one-year trial of targeted children between the ages of seven and 15 years old, 33 percent have started to attend school regularly. Eighty percent had already been involved with social services for other reasons.
"We have to do what is best for the children, and we may not have time to solve the parents' problems here and now," Lundqvist said.
While a phone call did the trick of waking up a few children, most of the others required social workers to come into their homes to make sure they got up, AFP said. The daily visits were also a "form of tutoring" for the parents to gradually take over the job of waking up their own children, Lundqvist said.
Although the project has failed to impress many and has caused accusations of intrusiveness, it has now become permanent and will soon be implemented in other parts of Copenhagen, AFP reported.
"There is nothing left to fight for... and if we can't get up in the morning, someone from the municipality will come and wake up the little ones," columnist Tom Jensen wrote in daily Berlingske.
"Where are the friends, where are the volunteers and everyone else? We can't outsource our personal responsibility to the municipality," Heidi Wang, a local politician for the Liberal Alliance party told AFP.
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