BATON ROUGE - Questions were raised after a 14-year-old was killed in Baton Rouge on the first day of school on Thursday.

The Family and Youth Service Center says they are working to keep every child in school but have extremely limited resources available to track truancy. According to the East Baton Rouge Parish School Board, truancy is absence from class or school for any portion of a period or day without permission from home or school.

The Family and Youth Service Center works with a single sheriff's deputy to check out reports of school-age children spotted away from school during school hours. She winds up dealing with problems far beyond defiant young people cutting classes. Sometimes, it's hard for them to get to school because they are homeless, which makes their lives uncertain and chaotic.

"Housing is a big issue for so many of the students and the families that are involved in our program,” Jennie Ponder, who director of the Truancy Assessment and Service Center, said. “More homeless students means more kids that are having challenges going to school.”

Ponder said missing school frequently is a red flag not only for dropping out but also is correlated with juvenile crime.

"The goal is to get a child back in school, but more importantly than that is to have the child connected to a positive experience at school,” Ponder said.

Travez Washington was killed in a shooting Thursday, the day East Baton Rouge Parish Schools started the new school year. Neighbors said he didn't attend school.

Ponder said authorities' limited ability to intervene means that many children don't get the help they need. Hundreds of juveniles go through their center each semester.

"Many of the students that we deal with who have truancy, it's generational just like there's generational poverty, generational crime, any lack of education, we want to change that," Ponder said. "The first step of a child's journey is being there, and that's the bottom line, and we go from there,"