OSTON -- FOR years, the daily grind of a Boston Public Schools truant officer has been pretty much the same. Hit the streets, seek out wayward youths and check for their names on your trusty list of students. Trouble is, that list is a computer printout (usually out of date) of about 63,000 student names, making it thicker than several phone books. It is, to say the least, awkward.

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"You need a dolly to carry it around," said Elliot Feldman, who oversees Boston's attendance officers, as they are called. "You need a microscope to read it."

And on a gusty fall day in New England, forget about flipping through it.

"A lot of people say Chicago is the Windy City," Mr. Feldman said. "They're wrong."

In September, Mr. Feldman plans to say goodbye to the printouts. With the help of the mobile telecommunications giant Nextel and a software and Web services company named AirClic, Boston's attendance officers are experimenting with souped-up cellphones that supply them with up-to-the-minute information on any student in the street.

An officer types a student's name into the phone, and soon the display fills up with vital statistics, including age, address, attendance record and (gulp) parents' phone numbers. It even shows bus routes and allergies. The program also supplies the student's schedule, so the officer can quickly see whether the class skipped was Spanish or gym.

"We grab the information from the Boston Public Schools system and get it back to the truancy officer in real time," said Phillip Riese, chief executive of AirClic. "We're talking seconds."

If an uncooperative student gives a friend's name instead of his own, the truant officer can quiz him to check his identity. As a next step, AirClic plans to outfit the phones with scanners that can read the bar code on a school ID card and find a student's file even more quickly.

The Java-enabled Nextel phones work with the AirClic platform to cull information from the school system's servers. Soon, Mr. Feldman says, truant officers may be able to use the program to "bop a kid" as well, meaning check with the Bureau of Probation to see whether a truant has any outstanding warrants and may belong in jail instead of class.

AirClic, which is based in Blue Bell, Pa., is adapting the system for other school districts. It has an application that can track students as they get on and off of school buses, another one that teachers can use to order classroom supplies and a third that tracks textbook inventory. The software does everything short of checking to see whether the dog really did eat the homework.

Because the system uses consumer-grade telephones and adaptable software, it may be economically feasible even for cash-strapped school systems. Boston is currently experimenting with the phones at no charge, but the actual cost would be about $20 a month for each of the 35 phones in use.

The cellphone system was well received by veteran Boston attendance officers, some of whom have depended on their bulky lists for 30 or 40 years.

"They love their phones," Mr. Feldman said. "Hopefully, the big book will be put away in September."