parents fighting Nebraska's expanded truancy law

Truancy hotline road sign
by Kyriaki from Deerfield Beach (Truant)
(Photo credit: Wikipedia, CC-BY-SA-2.0 )

Schools are using increased truancy laws to limit parental ability to make choices for their child even when illness is a factor. Claiming to be concerned about low performance, expanding the definition of truancy criminalizes excused absences, adds enforcement costs, often placed on families, and enlarges the power of police over families, a growing issue in the US schools. Incentives are wrong when schools receive more money based an attendance even from a sick or stressed child. Many different groups are aligned against the law. From the link:

Nebraska parents group urges repeal of state's truancy law - Omaha.com:  The Nebraska Family Forum joined with Douglas County Board member Mary Ann Borgeson at a press conference Tuesday to highlight concerns about the law and announce plans for legislation. 

But Brenda Vosik, Family Forum director, said the law continues to subject families to unnecessary legal oversight, including in situations in which most of the absences in question were for illness.

Some of those parents and children have been charged in juvenile court. Others, especially in Douglas County, have been put into a diversion program run by the courts.

“Literally thousands of kids have been dragged into the justice system for no reason, and it is not ending,” she said. [...] 

The parents group wants to return to a more traditional definition of truancy, in which the focus is on students who miss school without permission and in which parents have a greater role in excusing students. [...] 

Several other area groups either backed the call for repeal or otherwise expressed concern about its impacts. 

Willie Hamilton, executive director of Black Men United, said the state is “going down a slippery slope when we impeded parents' rights to parent.” [...] 

Nebraska Taxpayers for Freedom and the Heartland Workers Center also issued statements raising concerns about the law. The workers' group said in its statement it is concerned that many Latino immigrant families do not know about the law.

mass schools and the truancy trap

A great piece in the Atlantic about truancy and the structural issues that surround mass schooling. I post regularly on truancy and it is good to see this article in a national magazine.

This article focuses on how police and schools benefit financially from truancy (and poverty) and it is frightening. We have a real structural issue with schools who have been slow to provide deeply supportive services for students and families. And this is due to the flaw of compulsory attendance laws, that have been extended now to 12+ years with no guarantee that the high school degree will even get you a job. A mandatory twelve years and then you qualify to get a government loan for a community college that specializes in remediation services. The entire exercise is becoming meaningless except for all the jobs the school system and the prison industrial complex provides. And that is a very dangerous situation, as this article clearly shows.

Schools that had to actually serve their districts and provide what families and kids want would function very differently. They would have built strong services that support and include families and communities. Schools need to become community hubs that offer and network learning services of a wide variety to families who have the ability to select the services they want. We will never get there with schools who have lots of police power over families and children when it really ought to be the other way around.

The Truancy Trap - Annette Fuentes - The Atlantic: "Lead attorney Michael Churchill says that shifting demographics over the last decade are at the core of Lebanon's truancy woes, with newer Latino residents now forming a majority in the schools and longtime white residents feeling resentment. Truancy is at 14 percent and the dropout rate is 45 percent. "For the most part, the Hispanics don't have lot of interaction with the rest of the community," he said. "Lots of students aren't comfortable or doing well in school, so there's a high dropout rate. The schools' reaction was, instead of offering services, they went after truants.""

truancy in the news

Legislature OKs scaled-back truancy law - Omaha.com:

"LINCOLN — Nebraska lawmakers passed two bills Monday containing three key educational changes. 

The first eases up on the state's controversial truancy law by putting more decisions back in the hands of local schools. 

The second directs state education officials to look at more than test scores when measuring school performance. It also authorizes the creation of "career academies" to prepare students for jobs that don't require a college degree."

'Legislative Bill 933, the truancy measure, is expected to result in fewer Nebraska students being reported to legal authorities for missing school. But backers say it would not jeopardize efforts to identify students risk of falling behind and dropping out of school because of absences. 

Under the bill, schools no longer would have to send reports to county attorneys about students who miss more than 20 days of school because of illness or other excused absences. 

Reports would continue to be required for students who miss more than 20 days of school and have at least one unexcused absence. But schools would have to recommend whether the county attorney should pursue action against those students. 

Current law, which was passed two years ago, requires students to be reported to the county attorney's office after missing more than 20 days for any reason. The law leaves it to county attorneys to decide how to handle the reports.

Bill would guarantee counsel for juveniles accused of truancy (knoxnews.com)

Tennessee law guarantees the right to legal representation to all defendants accused of crimes — unless they're kids accused of skipping school.

A new bill seeks to change that. State Sen. Andy Berke, D-Chattanooga, and state Rep. Harry Brooks, R-Knoxville, are sponsoring legislation that would grant children involved in truancy cases the right to counsel. 

"The legal system is complex and doesn't always help the kid get to the right place," Berke said. "They're facing fines and other consequences. By having an attorney, we're going to encourage kids to cooperate and get back in school so they don't have to suffer those consequences."  

Juvenile defendants in Tennessee have no right under current law to counsel during truancy proceedings. That's because truancy — defined as at least five chronic, unexcused absences from school — doesn't technically qualify as a crime, even though it's illegal.

Education bill set to raise tension in Parliament: 

"In an attempt to further explain the rationale behind the education reform bill, the minister announced that it was a necessity to arrange the twelve-year compulsory education system in a discontinuous way, because “we need to offer flexibility and make the education system more democratic in line with developments at the national level.”

The education reform bill aims to change the duration of compulsory education from a consecutive and uninterrupted eight years to a version formulized as the “4+4+4 system,” where children will be able to enroll in other types of educational institutions -- namely vocational high schools -- after the first four years. The bill has been criticized by the main opposition party as being not based on facts of pedagogy, but ideology, in the way it allows religious education at a younger age."

allAfrica.com: Tanzania: Truancy Rampant in Mwanga:

"He said pupils who miss classes are from pastoral communities, adding that truancy was rampant during dry seasons when Maasai children are forced by their parents to look for pasture and water for the livestock. "Masais lead nomadic life, moving from one place to another in search of pasture and water. They move along with the entire family, affecting children in school," Mr Nderu said. 

Despite that setback, average class attendance in 109 primary schools in the district was currently at 98 per cent which, he said, was one of the factors that raised academic performance during last year's National Standard Seven Examination. Other factors that enabled primary schools to achieve impressive results are remedial classes conducted willingly by teachers themselves and having in place qualified teachers, he said." 

KC truancy measure stalls amid opposition from parents and children - KansasCity.com: 

"But committee member Michael Brooks said he wanted to see more intervention programs from the Kansas City public schools, such as alternative schools and social workers, before the city adopts a potentially punitive approach. 

Numerous home school families also worried that police could stop their children just for going to a library or museum unattended. 

Wagner said the measure specifically guards against abuse of home schoolers. He said he plans to schedule more meetings between school officials and council members to convince his colleagues that his measure has merit."

Truancy center opening set | Home | The Advocate — Baton Rouge, LA: 

East Baton Rouge Parish District Attorney Hillar Moore said at Tuesday’s news conference that he hopes the center will be open in August for the beginning of the school year and that it will provide “in one location all the resources needed to address the many underlying problems faced by our school youth and their families.”"

Meditation Helps Lower Truancy and Suspensions

Surrounded by poverty and escalating violence, a San Francisco middle school committed to peace and embraced a program of meditation that has made students feel safer, teachers more productive, and brought unity and purpose to the school. 

suspensions grow

Lincoln Park High School, Chicago ILlicensed image via Wikipedia

CPS Administered Over 40,000 Out of School Suspension in 2010-11 | Suspension Stories:
"Data obtained from the Illinois State Board of Education through a Freedom of Information Action (FOIA) request show that Chicago Public Schools (CPS) administered 17,020 in-school suspensions, 40,662 out-of-school suspensions and 217 expulsions in the 2010-2011 academic year. Specific demographic information about these suspensions and expulsions has yet to be released."

Dismantling the School-to-Prison Pipeline: A Survey from the Field | The Defenders Online | A Civil Rights Blog: 

truancy in the news

Truancy will be preserved in the online world if professional educators have their way. After all, if we didn't have compulsory attendance law, the education industry wouldn't have a captive audience.  This arrangement is at the heart of why our schools do not work: our schools are at war with families.

What began as a seasonal few years of required attendance to get some core skills, has grown into a very long and abusive process whereby a child is in job training for 12+ years and blamed for any problems that arise.

The choice isn't between abusive policing or of complete neglect to provide, as the choice is usually framed. Lots of voices are clustered around these options, to be sure. Enforce truancy for the child's own good or eliminate government schools. This type of dialog is common when talking about education, and it reflects frustrations, but we have other choices.

We could actually consider providing community learning resources that families access as they need and want.  The vast majority of families would choose to access some or many services. Families actually want their children to succeed though poverty, stress, and the poor psychological design of schooling all take their toll. Even for families staying out of poverty, the schools waste immense amounts of student energy and time in authoritarian procedures that are relics.

Democracies do not need to police citizens in the name of education: services can be offered and families will choose what they need. Providing high-functioning social services makes a nation-state more social in positive ways and translates into stronger families, communities, and economies.

• Minnesota online schools coax prosecutors to go after truants despite outdated law | The Republic:
  

  When a Minnesota school considers a student habitually truant, it's legally obligated to notify the authorities in the students' home county — meaning an online school may work with all 87 Minnesota counties. The notification triggers a process that typically includes meetings between educators, county officials and the student's family to write a court-approved plan to get the student back to school. Violators can be sentenced to community service or fined. In very rare cases, parents can lose custody of the child. 

• The Angry Dad: Mom jailed for truancy:  

"As for the Truancy issue, my son Logan has a serious case of Asthma. The school has been very aware of this as I write it on ALL his papers every year when school starts. I even tried leaving his inhalers with the school nurse in case of emergency. But they claim that they can't have his meds there." 

What has happened to me is happening because I stood up for my son's rights. I stood up to the Truancy officer, school nurse, and principal of Fairview Elementary. I even wrote an email to the Superintendent asking for his help in resolving this issue between the Truancy Officer, School Nurse and Principal. But it went unanswered. A few weeks later, my husband and I were arrested without warning, without a S.A.R.B meeting, etc.

I am glad you posted our story on your website, as it makes us feel that there is support out there."

• In Texas, Keeping Kids In School And Out Of Court : NPR: 

"This summer, an exhaustive study by the Council of State Governments found that by 12th grade, more than half of all 14- to 15-year-olds in Texas are ticketed, expelled or suspended at least once. After they're ticketed, sent to court and fined hundreds of dollars, students aren't always allowed to go back to their home school. Instead, they're sent to an alternative school, a holding pen of sorts where kids are supposed to "learn their lesson.""

• San Francisco Schools Tackle Truancy With Innovation - NYTimes.com: 

"For decades, teachers and school districts have battled truancy, struggling to engage students who cope with economic hardship, community strife, domestic violence and drug abuse. Some students avoid school because they are not interested or because they are being bullied. But since 2008, in part because of programs like those at Downtown, the San Francisco district’s chronic truancy has dropped by 31 percent."

• Lawmakers again focus on truancy - Omaha.com: 

"But the law also has had unintended consequences because it moved away from a focus on truancy, or unexcused absences, to a broader focus on "excessive absenteeism."

Under the law, school districts must report to the county attorney all students who accumulate more than 20 absences in a school year, regardless of the reasons for the absences.

It also shifted responsibility from schools to the legal system for responding to absences.

The result has been cases like Carter's 13-year-old daughter, an A and B student and student council member who faces truancy charges in Sarpy County Juvenile Court after missing 27 school days last year.

Carter said all of the absences were health-related. Her daughter suffers severe allergies, which cause excruciating headaches and leave her vulnerable to repeat infections.

She said the problem of infections has increased this year because parents fearful of the new law are sending their sick children to school.

The truancy charges remain pending, even after Carter provided the court with doctors' notes explaining her daughter's medical problems."

• Michigan To Fine Detroit Public Schools For High Truancy 
  (huffingtonpost.com)]
  
  Jan Ellis, a department spokeswoman, said her office is working with DPS to review attendance records before making any deductions. For 2009-10, DPS lost $680,000 to low attendance.
  
  "While the forfeiture amount has yet to be determined, it is expected to be a fraction of the amount in question," Ellis said. "This issue involves classroom attendance record-keeping, as well as student attendance."

background posts

• real school reform (and a changing view of attendance)
• homeschooling is the real legacy of holt, kohl, et al and why compulsory attendance laws are limiting our ability to change schools
• voluntary attendance
• understanding school funding
• the compulsory attendance mindset
• the cost of getting tough
• semi-private clubs called schools

chronic is four

Wichita schools redefine, fight ‘chronic absenteeism’ | Wichita Eagle:

"Parents, a quick quiz:

How many school days would your child have to miss during a nine-week grading period to be considered “chronically absent”?

Ten? Twelve? Fifteen?

Try four.

Armed with a growing collection of data that shows test scores drop as absences rise, Wichita schools have redefined “chronic absenteeism” and are launching new strategies to make sure kids get to school and stay through the final bell.

“Every day’s lesson builds upon the previous day. So when you miss a half-day or even an hour, you’re missing a huge chunk of information,” said Lisa Lutz, executive director of innovation and evaluation for the Wichita school district."

and this too:

"Unlike truancy, which relates to unexcused absences, chronic absenteeism includes parent-excused absences such as those for dental appointments, family commitments and vacations. It does not include in-school suspensions or missed class time for school-sponsored activities."

The family can't win: prosecuted if they allow an unhappy child to have time off, schools create large family tensions and stress. Schools police the parents so the parents will police the child. And neither the child nor the parent have a voice in much of anything. Parental involvement is legislated out of existence. And it is always the parents who are the bad guys: parents cause almost every social ill we can name. Parents are the reason our economic system, schools systems, and prison systems don't work better. It's parents who don't provide good material for these institutions to process.

From the activist teachers at Cooperative Catalyst:

The Real Reason Kids Are Missing From School (coopcatalyst.wordpress.com)


If it were my survey in my community, I would add the following options:

• Quit treating student absences as a criminal act and assuming that the state knows better than the parents how to raise a child. Quit criminalizing the victims of social injustice and help parents instead.
• Provide better jobs for parents (many of our students move frequently because they live transient lives)
• Provide a pathway to legal citizenship for immigrant families (families are fleeing to and from states out of fear of deportation, despite working hard and providing for their families)
• Daycare for parents with young children or a living wage so that families can live off of one income (many of our students miss school to watch younger siblings)
• Universal healthcare (many of our students miss school because they are not getting the preventative care that they need.)

I blog about how the family is systematically excluded from any role at all in so-called public schools because of compulsory attendance laws that have been stretched past any possible use. These laws have helped preserve the factory approach of schooling and have worked to exclude the people who would bring the greatest counterweight to bear on an institution that has no structural limits on what it can impose on a child or what can be devised. The so-called educated manufacture ignorance and dumb-down books into curricula to remain employed.

We can learn to structure schools as social services for families instead of against them. We can make institutions that support families and children and in doing so, make them truly social and sustainable. We can move past the factory model and toward a cooperative model. We can have every single parent deeply involved if we really want to, make no mistake about it. And while fixing everything else sounds good, individual families can make significant adjustments if they are allowed control from health issues to bullying to academics, all can be improved, one by one, if families have control.

blaming families, juvenile justice edition
bullying families and children
every parent should have real choices
undermining the family and the child
blaming parents, blaming the family

links

Truants would lose driver's licenses under Berks County lawmaker's bill - Berks Community Television - Berks County; Reading PA: Citizen Reports:

"Caltagirone said his legislation would remove a $300 fine assessed for truant offenders older than 13 because if they cannot pay the fine they are placed in a youth detention center or jail. 

'While this may seem like tough love, it really does more harm than good,' Caltagirone said. 'Children who skip school are already at risk and need positive guidance. Placing them in detention centers and jail usually leads to them learning criminal tendencies from other offenders and does nothing to encourage the student to change or improve him or herself.' 

Instead, the proposed legislation would suspend the driver's license of any student who has failed to respond to a citation or summons on a truancy charge."

Skills and jobs don't line up. But what to do? | What Went Wrong: The Betrayal of The American Dream: 

"One way to do that would be through a lifelong learning account, said Steven Gunderson, a former Republican congressman from Wisconsin. 

The worker would put 10 cents an hour into a private account, matched by the employer. The worker could draw on the account to fund training, as needed. Other panelists suggested an overhaul of the current workforce development system, which provides training through public and private institutions, largely paid for through the Workforce Investment Act. 

However it’s funded, the quality and usefulness of job training varies widely. Many workforce development programs don’t grant credentials that are accepted by industry, said Roberts Jones, assistant secretary of labor for employment and training under Reagan and the first President Bush. Recognized certifications “are the empowering tools,” he said. But, Jones said, the idea of standardized credentials has not gained traction at the departments of labor or education."

This idea ties your education to your income. It would not change a system that has no structural check or way to control expanding coursework and costs/fees/tuition, all of which grow to make good jobs for the institution itself.


Programming jobs fall, despite Labor Department's outlook | What Went Wrong: The Betrayal of The American Dream: 

"From 1990, when Labor made its rosy prediction that programming jobs over the next 15 years would increase at a faster rate than other jobs, the U.S. workforce grew by 24 percent. If the number of programmers had increased at that pace — let alone at the optimistic rate Labor had once projected — there would have been at least 700,000 programmers by 2006. Instead, there were only 435,000. Programmer jobs have continued to decline and were at 427,000 in 2008, the last year for which figures are available. Even that masked the magnitude of the domestic job losses. For among those 427,000 programmers were thousands of H-1B guest workers–foreign nationals brought in by American companies under immigration law to do programming, usually at much lower pay and benefits."

There is no coherent job plan for people who spend private money to get a degree and there never has been.

Mother Facing Jail Time Over Truant Son | NBC Los Angeles: 

"Long Beach police arrested Emilia Zamora, 43, on Monday because her son, a middle school student, failed to go to school more than ten percent of the time this year. 

'Her response was, 'I tell him to go to school but he does what he wants to do,'' according to Sgt. Rob Gallagher, of the Long Beach Police Dept."

keeping kids in line

From a post up at Youth Today:

More Texas students have been suspended or expelled than have not, according to a forthcoming study of state trends on school discipline. And the margin isn’t that close.
Details of the study will not be public until July 19, but Council of State Governments Justice Center Director Michael Thompson said at a federal juvenile justice meeting yesterday that nearly six out of 10 Texas students had received an in-school or out-of-school suspension, were expelled, or were incarcerated at some point by their 12th grade year.

It is the first look at an entire state’s practices in disciplining students. It tracks 928,940 students who entered seventh grade between 2000 and 2003, using records from Texas school districts and the agencies that oversee juvenile probation and confinement.

Thompson discussed the findings at the Coordinating Council on Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention meeting, which was attended by Attorney General Eric Holder. The study found that: 

• 58 percent of the students had received a suspension or worse by 12th grade.
• The vast majority (about 90 percent) of those actions were taken at the discretion of school administrators. The notion that state law or federal law drives suspensions and expulsions “is simply not the case,” Thompson said.
• Violent offenses accounted for about 10 percent of the disciplinary actions.

The study also will show that a healthy percentage of youth have 11 or more disciplinary actions, Thompson indicated, and many of them also have juvenile records. 

Thompson described the presence of an emotional disturbance as an “off the charts” predictor of severe discipline. 

The study does not cover truancy or anything about law enforcement presence on school grounds. 

And truancy is being more rigorously enforced across the board as school are pressured to perform on tests, which means these figures are larger.

Related articles

• Zero-Tolerance Education Policies Are Destroying Young People's Lives (alternet.org)
• Graduating to prison (timesunion.com)
• Why Juvenile Detention Makes Teens Worse (time.com)

truancy in the news

Truancy Bill Would Revoke Parents License For Too Many Absences:

"Lawmakers are saying truancy, or unexcused absences, is getting out of hand all across the state. Senator Erik Wells, D-Kanawha, said parents need to be more responsible with their child's education, and he's planning to introduce a bill that will put the pressure on parents to do just that. 

In this bill, some parents could lose their drivers license if they knowingly let their child unlawfully miss ten or more days of school. 'We need to be sending the message to parents who have the ability to get their children to school and are not doing it, and let them know that if you're going to do that, you're sentencing your child to a life of less opportunity,' he said."

Parents of students who skip school could be evicted from public housing | HeraldTribune.com

The agency charged with providing homes and support for Sarasota's poorest families has drafted an unusual plan to add some local bite to state compulsory attendance laws. 

Before the next school year, the Sarasota Housing Authority hopes to add a new rule in tenants' lease agreements: If your students do not go to class, prepare to be evicted.

More than 200 children between age 6 and 16, and their families, would be affected. As a condition of their housing, parents would be required to sign a waiver granting permission for the school to release student records.The new policy could also help lower daytime crimes around housing projects, said Sarasota Police Department Capt. Paul Sutton.

School's Cool: Tough Love Truancy Ticketing No More! (laist.com)

Those opposed to the practice of ticket writing say that method of punishment, along with the heavy fines, "are exactly the wrong method for achieving better attendance."

Said one student who had been ticketed in the past: "It's more of a waste of time than helping us out. It's just a bad experience for anyone. It's scary too," reports ABC7. 

Truancy ticketing data published by the Times shows that during 2004-2009, of the over 47,000 tickets issued in the Los Angeles Unified School District, 88% of them went to African American and Latino students. "And not one of the more than 13,118 curfew tickets issued by the school police went to a white student," note reform advocates.

When students don't go to school, parents go to jail - baltimoresun.com 

Barbara Gaskins says she took her 15-year-old son to his bus stop every morning at 7:30, well in time for his 9 a.m. homeroom bell at Patterson High School. She obtained as many medical excuses as the doctor would allow when her son suffered from a series of stomach viruses. And she has taught her children that they have to "get an education to get somewhere in life."

But Gaskins was recently jailed for 10 days — one of the dozen parents of Baltimore City students to receive a sentence this year — after failing to send her child to school 103 of 130 days.

More than 400 parents have received notification this school year that they would face a District Court judge as a result of charges filed by the school system's Office of Attendance and Truancy.

Even more than a letter home from their students' teachers or principals, parents dread a letter from Alfred Barbour, the court liaison for the school system. He enforces the school system's philosophy that children younger than 16 — the state's compulsory age of attendance — missing exorbitant amounts of school is not only unacceptable but criminal.

When she was sentenced to 10 days in jail, to be served five consecutive weekends, Gaskins said she was most concerned about who would care for her four children, all school-age.

"Of course, I'm scared: I've never been in trouble with the law — period," a teary-eyed Gaskins said in an interview after she received her sentence, which began that Friday. "We're a Christian family."

But it was the third time Gaskins had gone before District Judge Barbara B. Waxman since she was first cited in April last year.

Barbour said cases like Gaskins' are rare. No parents were sentenced to jail last year, and about three were the year before that.

About 402 parents have been cited this school year, 407 in the 2010 school year, and 375 in 2009. 
....
"I think the school system kind of abuses its power, where they come in and muscle people into pleading guilty," he [defense atty Hayat] said. "I have a moral issue with how they're criminalizing parents who aren't really criminals at all — and it doesn't even fix the problem."

LAPD adjusts daytime curfew policy | abc7.com

Some students at Roosevelt High School told teacher Jorge Lopez they were being harassed by police. 

"We want to create a culture where students feel nurtured on campus, not feel afraid to come to campus," said Lopez. 

The LAPD began working with community groups to address their concerns to revise how the police enforce the daytime curfew policy. Officers will now not ticket students in the first hour of classes and police are encouraged not to ticket those who are clearly on their way to school.  

.... 

Matthew Lopez says he was ticketed last year but the ticket was dismissed because he was not in violation of daytime curfew.

"It's more of a waste of time than helping us out. It's just a bad experience for anyone. It's scary too," said Lopez. 

Lopez's mother says she realizes police are trying to crack down on kids committing crimes, but she says officers need to encourage students to go to class rather than write tickets many families can't afford.

 Related articles

• Now That's the Way to Handle Truancy! (zwingliusredivivus.wordpress.com)
• California school district battles truancy with GPS (macworld.com)
• Senate drops plan to fine schools over truancies (seattletimes.nwsource.com)

truancy hawks want every dollar

Council bill links mental health, truancy and violence | Erica Redmond | Capital Land | Washington Examiner Using their police power, schools have long been instrumental in advocating for medications to subdue children and the pressure of NCLB to reduce drop out numbers has increased this pressure even more. Truancy police are created by compulsory attendance laws that militarize a public social service and make schools police families in ever more ruthless ways. This bill takes it a step further:

At-large D.C. Councilman David Catania introduced a bill Tuesday that would crack down on student truancy and tailor behavioral health programming to the needs of District schools. 

The bill would require mental health screening for children under the age of 6 in order to prevent future behavioral problems, as well as train teachers to evaluate students for mental health problems. The bill also includes tougher truancy standards because truancy is directly linked to violence, Catania said. Currently, students can have 25 unexcused absences during a school year before being referred to the court system. The bill would reduce the number of unexcused absences to seven per month or 10 over the course of a school year.
Catania announced the bill last week on the one-year anniversary of a mass shooting on South Capitol Street that left four teenagers dead. 

“The District’s legacy of failure in these areas created the conditions that made tragedy like the one that occurred a year ago possible,” Catania said last week. “The bill will create the most comprehensive and sophisticated youth mental health screening system in the country and will at long last ensure real enforcement of existing truancy laws."

Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://washingtonexaminer.com/blogs/capital-land/2011/04/council-links-mental-health-truancy-and-violence#ixzz1IkoLqTdY

truancy in the news 3-24-11

Dallas school district asks Dallas County Judge to reduce truancy fines | Crime Blog | dallasnews.com From the article:  Some kids may be dropping out of school rather than pay hefty fines they cannot afford, hence the consideration of reducing fines:  

"Commissioner John Wiley Price said the decision is up to Jenkins but that he would support a fine reduction.  It's kind of counterproductive," Price said about high fees. "The objective of the fines is to compel people to remain in school."

Change: Find new ways to handle youths with truancy problems | Pacific Daily News | guampdn.com In Guam school officials want a state-of-the-art monitoring system to help truants, a predictable scheme

Huntsville mother jailed for keeping children out of school | al.com  She has two 15-year olds and a 16-year old that have been truant and she got 6 months in jail, suspended to 3 days, the second parent in Huntsville to get jail time. I know nothing about the case but I do know some parents cannot easily deal with forcing children that old to do something they don't want to do.

Tables turned for JP who jailed truant teens - San Antonio Express-News Whatever happened in this case about a justice of the peace convicted of oppression in Hildalgo County near the border, note the statistic in the article that this judge handled 26,000 truancy cases in 10 years -- this county may want to check into Oregon's program (below)

PCC Rock Creek High-School Equivalency Program points migrant workers on the path toward career success | OregonLive.com Oregon has a program providing substantial support to migrant workers' families

schools increase policing of kids and families

There is an economic mess caused by criminal behavior unchecked by shareholders or congress.  And since attendance is tied to funding, truancy is getting more attention, as funds are shrinking.  Schools initially required compulsory attendance for a much shorter length of time but today schools use their police power on older kids to improve numbers.

Schools never developed the skills of negotiating, mediation and problem-solving that would enable them to generate services for unhappy or poorly served kids.  Instead we gave schools police power over families and kids.  In this situation, when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Replacing child labor in factories with child labor in schools is really not much of an improvement. Homeschooling, the real school reform movement, was begun in response to the push from over-sized institutions with no check on their power to police citizens.  It has taken activism for more than 40 years to enable the family to be recognized as a place a child can spend time in.

Truancy fines are going up as the so-called free public schools, neither free nor public, cost more and more for families already struggling with 30 years of wage decline for working class families.  And now schools want to use truancy fees as well as increasing general fees in spite of the fact that citizens already pay for these schools with their taxes.

• Mom charged with forging a doctor's note:
• "Anaheim School District Hands Out GPS Units To Habitually Truant Students" and related posts (huffingtonpost.com)
• School reviews plan to grade on student's BMI scores
• Cities Take Aim at Truancy (education.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com)

• Provo proposal would criminalize daytime truancy 
• Educators seek ways to cut truancy 
• Lebanon School District Sued Over Excessive Truancy Fines (huffingtonpost.com)
• Suit targets Lebanon School District's fines for truancy (pennlive.com)
• California school district battles truancy with GPS (macworld.com)
• School officials hit the streets to round up truants (charlotte.news14.com)
• City enlisting celebs to fight truancy (nydailynews.com)
• Columbus schools, police keep truancy program alive (dispatch.com)
• California School District Battles Truancy with GPS (pcworld.com)
• City Takes Aim at Truancy
• DC Police Pickup more than 4700 truants this year
• Columbus Considers Funding Third Truancy Center
• Responding to truancy?
• Anti-truancy initiative ok'd

more truancy in the news

An article on Pennsylvania truancy fines (hat tip to Corn and Oil):

A federal lawsuit accuses a Pennsylvania school district of imposing excessive and illegal fines on truant children or their families, including one parent ordered to pay $27,000 and a 17-year-old student fined more than $12,000.

The suit against the Lebanon School District, filed Thursday in Harrisburg by the Public Interest Law Center of Philadelphia on behalf of four parents and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, targets the court-imposed fines it says were above the state's limit of $300 per violation.

The suit seeks a class-action declaration and the return of any illegal money that the south-central Pennsylvania district collected. It also asks the court to stop the district from trying to collect any fines that violate state law and remain unpaid.

Superintendent Marianne Bartley has denied any wrongdoing by the district and referred calls Thursday to a lawyer. The lawyer, Rebecca Young, said that some of the law center's information in its public statements is inaccurate, but that she had not seen a copy of the lawsuit and could not comment on it.

Many state truancy laws allow fines or even jail; Pennsylvania allows penalties to be imposed after three unexcused absences.

The maximum penalty is $300 per unexcused absence, and the fine can be imposed on parents, as well as children 13 or older. As an alternative, a judge can order parents to complete a parenting education program or to perform community service. If a parent does not comply, a judge can order up to five days in jail.

Fining a 17-year-old for truancy?  How about refunds of tax dollars to kids who can't do college-level work?  More from the post (emphases mine)

Besides imposing illegal fines, the district has enforced payment with jail, even getting one person incarcerated for 85 days, the law center said.

The 17-year-old fined more than $12,000 is not a plaintiff, nor is the parent who was ordered to pay $27,000 in fines because she didn't have $70 to pay for a home-schooling evaluation.

One plaintiff, Omary Rodriguez Fuentes, has paid $1,064 in fines from her disability income and still owes $5,927 for 29 truancy citations, the suit said. She is the parent of three current students and one former student in the district.

The New York-based Vera Institute of Justice issued a policy paper in October after analyzing that state's truancy program and suggested that punishment is counterproductive, even though the most common responses to teenage chronic absence around the country is punitive.

The laws that give schools power over parents are the compulsory attendance laws, see my posts here and here and here.  They have no place in a social service for families in a democratic country.

Pressure on teachers means they want to start grading parents in which the public school system now inserts itself into the family as we all know that the family is the source of all our problems.

Contaminate the entire Gulf of Mexico, well, it's a business error.  A child with poor grades:  put the parents in jail.  It is incredible to understand that compulsory attendance was considered necessary in large part to combat child labor and now these laws have the effect of maintaining new child labor camps, called schools, where standards, grading and truancy police ensure more exploitation of children and families.

Police have no place in a social service that should be humane and working closely with families instead of a factory system that issues instructions and threats.

Related articles

• Record numbers of parents getting criminal records for letting children skip school (dailymail.co.uk)
• NAACP to sue Lebanon School District over truancy policies (pennlive.com)

felony indictment of a parent by public school police

An astounding story  about an Ohio mom whose so-called crime was having her children stay with their grandfather and attend the better schools in his area, about 2 miles away.

The police arm of our school system is flexing its muscle.  This parent is a good parent and schools are not a prison but a social service we taxpayers all chip in to provide for our kids.  As money gets tighter, will we be facing more of this criminalization of parents?

From a post at Criminal Justice (has a petition up for signatures): 

"An Ohio mother of two was sentenced to 10 days in jail and placed on three years probation after sending her kids to a school district in which they did not live. Kelly Williams-Bolar was sentenced by Judge Patricia Cosgrove on Tuesday and will begin serving her sentence immediately. The jury deliberated for seven hours and the courtroom was packed as the sentence was handed down. She was convicted on two counts of tampering with court records after registering her two girls as living with Williams Bolar's father when they actually lived with her. The family lived in the housing projects in Akron, Ohio, and the father’s address was in nearby Copley Township. Additionally, Williams-Bolar’s father, Edward L. Williams, was charged with a fourth-degree felony of grand theft, in which he and his daughter are charged with defrauding the school system for two years of educational services for their girls. The court determined that sending their children to the wrong school was worth $30,500 in tuition. - Dr. Boyce Watkins                    

That any parent could have any police action whatsoever directed against them by a public social service for having her children spend time with their grandfather and attend the school in his district is appalling.


It is a good thing for children to visit their grandfather, who lived about 2 miles away.  And if the kids attend the school near him, that should be fine.  In fact, if the school is almost all white, well, even better.  In this case, a family is integrating by choice. This is not a crime.


I am no expert on funding of schools.  But )several things are clear from this case:

• Ohio has a broken and unequal system of funding that is criminal in effect
• Do these parents from a wealthier area who get all this extra financial funding, pay more for state colleges?  
• Do wealthier districts take standardized tests adjusted for higher performers?  
• Are the families in these wealthy districts means-tested for school access?  
• What did those unnecessary 10 days of jail cost Ohio? 
• For that matter, the entire court case brought against her: what did that cost?  

More importantly, if education is an investment, then why does she owe anything?  She may have saved the state money by having her kids get an education; kids have a stronger social base by staying with a grandfather.  And she completed her schooling.  We will all benefit from her work and her daughter's as well.



Shifting schools, if we had 21st century voluntary community learning centers, could be done more often.  It requires routine administrative flexibility, mediation and coordination, skills our system will never even try to master since they can use their police arm to maintain their rigid production line mentality.  Lots of broken state funding mechanisms help that along, as we have seen and these broken systems reflect the fact that families are locked out of this system:  it is driven entirely from the top.

Compulsory attendance laws have created a system that is not only unresponsive to the needs of their communities but this policy has given schools a police arm that is unacceptable in a social service in a democratic country.  We will never have the schools we want and need unless all parents begin to understand compulsory attendance laws as homeschoolers have had to do.


We should not empower an institution like the schools with policing families.  We already have social service agencies in every state that can check on families who may be abusive or neglectful at any time.  Any family anywhere can be investigated.  That system has its issues but it can stand as a check on families and a protector of children.  But having schools police families makes an adversary of the very people who should be allies in a social service that is about learning.

Compulsory attendance laws give the schools police power over families and if your only tool is a hammer, everything you see is a nail (Twain)  The system is broken for a lot of people, times are hard, and their only tool is a hammer: families, watch out.