We are still not sure after reading Monday’s front-page story if Guyer High School junior Carlos Gracida has ever actually played hooky in his 11-year career as a student, but he admits to being tempted.

“I felt that pressure,” he told the Record-Chronicle’s Amy Dodd Thompson. “You want to skip school.”

That is as far as Carlos Gracida took the matter, and we’re willing to drop it right there. The mantle of the Fifth Amendment falls about the shoulders of Carlos Gracida just as it did about those of John Gotti, Willie “The Actor” Sutton and Richard Milhous Nixon. If we were willing to grant the presumption of innocence to those three worthies, we are certainly willing to give it to young Gracida, who recently won a design competition for an anti-truancy poster that will be used throughout the Denton school district.

Gracida, who studies graphic design at the school district’s LaGrone Advanced Technology Complex, told our reporter that his own experience told him that the prospect of skipping school was tantalizing, and that actually doing it could become habit-forming. From there, he said, grades can begin to fall — along with ambition — and dropping out becomes a distinct possibility.

Gracida’s poster is an arresting design (you should pardon the expression), with a hard-nosed message.

“Learning can be HARD sometimes,” screams a headline next to a dramatic half-face close-up of Gracida’s face. “School can be tough … It’s not easy, but it’s WORTH IT. Your friends will try to stress you out and push you to make the wrong decisions. Be true to yourself and don’t write yourself off. BEWARE. SCHOOL is more IMPORTANT than you think and IT’S THE LAW. Stop truancy!”

Denton truant Officer Sandra Golden got the idea for a poster after an employer took steps that finally got Golden in touch with a truant student’s mother.

If one person could be persuaded to become involved in the truancy problem, she reasoned, perhaps others could, too, and perhaps they could be motivated by a poster.

She went to the LaGrone Center, where the idea for a contest was hatched.

That is the marvelous thing about one good idea: It will often spawn another, and the positive consequences will just keep flowing.

Just look at this story: A conscientious professional (Golden) searches for a way to fight truancy, and an innovative educational program (the LaGrone Center) provides a way for it to come to fruition.

Best of all, a bright young student (Carlos Gracida) produces a great piece of work that hits the nail on the head and, as an added bonus, provides him with a much-deserved shot of self-esteem.

“It made my whole year,” Gracida told our reporter. “If you work hard for it, you get it.”

Which is pretty much an anti-truancy message in itself.

Gracida, by the way, credits his mother with motivating him to concentrate on his schoolwork.

“I realized that she was right,” he said.

It is a wise young man who listens to his mother.