It is so much quieter in school when no one's there.
Texas appleseed released a report on Texas's
truancy policy and practices. The findings are alarming:
• Texas currently prosecutes more than twice the number of truancy cases prosecuted in all other states combined. These students are sent to adult criminal courts, unlike almost all other states, which send them to civil juvenile courts.
• While some Texas school districts have implemented effective school- and community-based programs to address truancy, these approaches are not the norm. Children rarely get the individualized attention that research suggests is most effective in intervening with truant youth.
• Four in five children sent to court for truancy are economically disadvantaged, according
to TEA—yet fines are the most common sanction for children charged with truancy.
• Due process protections are often ignored in the courts where these cases are prosecuted, with children (who are rarely represented by counsel) pleading guilty or no contest to charges they often do not understand, even when they may have a valid defense.
• In some jurisdictions, judges order children charged with truancy to withdraw from school
and take the GED; this resulted in 6,423 court-ordered dropouts who failed the test over a three-year period—a number likely to grow significantly in the face of plunging passage rates for the GED.
• African-American and Hispanic students are overrepresented in truancy cases statewide, as are special education students. Finding more effective ways to intervene with these youth is critical, since these students are among those most vulnerable to poor educational outcomes.
In that last finding the word "overrepresented" equals 83.6% of Texas truancy cases last school year. Al-Jazeera America has put together a multi-part series on
Texas's truancy problem. In 2014 Texas "assessed fines and court costs of $16.1 million for truancy convictions". This has resulted in the truancy policy performing as a
criminalization of children policy. It's so bad that a month ago, Senator John Whitmire (D-Houston) proposed and passed a bill to decriminalize the truancy system.
“No school should make a criminal charge out of a hardship of somebody that’s going through a divorce, or a 14-year-old that has no maternity clothes so she can’t go to school,” Whitmire said.
Under his legislation, Whitmire said school administrators and judges would have all the same tools they have now to try to ensure kids are not skipping school. The difference, he argued, is there would be no criminal charge to follow a young person around for the rest of their life.
The only other state to apply criminal justice to truancy is Wyoming. If you're running your state with policies championed by the legislators of Wyoming you're basically living in
a prison state. Here's an example of how this
super brilliant system works:
Raquel was 14 when she had her first hearing in truancy court. She says she knew what “truancy” meant but was confused when the judge asked her to enter a plea of guilty, not guilty or no contest. “I was looking at my mom for all the answers, and she couldn’t talk,” Raquel remembers. Children charged with truancy, unlike those facing more serious crimes, have no right to court-appointed counsel if they can’t afford it, and many judges will not allow parents to speak for their children. A frustrated but helpless Yolanda says: “You’re standing there in silence. You want to say something, but you’re not allowed.”
Yolanda and Raquel are poor. This was followed by three more court cases, a conviction, and a $180 fine and court cost decision. They didn't have that money.
In September, with $107 still unpaid and two more unexcused absences, she was summoned to court again. This time, the judge ordered her to do community service in lieu of paying the fine and threatened to hold her in contempt of court if she missed any more days of school. On Feb. 19, 2014, he followed through on that threat, and sent Raquel to Dallas County’s Truancy Enforcement Center.
The best part of all of this is that all of these kids (upwards of 100,000) have adult criminal records before they even get to be an adult!