Newsom Signs Bill Reversing Harris-Promoted Truancy Prosecution Law
Kamala Harris first championed the idea of prosecuting parents for truant children when she served as San Francisco district attorney.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill that reversed the law that prosecuted parents for truant children. The pupil could even face prosecution.
Newsom signed SB691 into law that changed the language regarding truancy.
SB691 eliminated language regarding legal penalties the parents and pupil could face and suggested parents attend class with their child:
(c) That parents or guardians who fail to meet this obligation may be guilty of an infraction and subject to prosecution pursuant to Article 6 (commencing with Section 48290).
(f) That the pupil may be subject to prosecution under Section 48264.
(g) That it is recommended that the parent or guardian accompany the pupil to school and attend classes with the pupil for one day.
The bill added language about mental health services:
(e) That mental health and supportive services may be available to the pupil and the family.
(f) That school personnel are available to meet with the pupil and family to develop strategies to support the pupil’s attendance at school.
(g) That research shows that missing 10 percent of school for any reason can translate into pupils having difficulty learning to read by third grade, achieving in middle school, and graduating from high school.
Kamala Harris first championed the idea of prosecuting parents for truant children when she served as San Francisco district attorney:
As San Francisco district attorney, Harris prosecuted some parents as part of her efforts to reduce truancy. Harris’ office sent letters to San Francisco families at the start of the school year warning that they would face consequences if their children were chronically absent. Though part of her strategy involved threatening parents with jail time, her office didn’t actually send any to jail. Students who missed a big chunk of school in early grades are never able to catch up, she said, and those who drop out in high school are more likely to become homicide victims.
In 2009, Harris touted data showing a 23% drop in truancy among San Francisco elementary school students as evidence her approach was working.
At the time, she acknowledged her efforts were controversial, but she argued truancy was a serious enough problem to merit her aggressive approach.
“If it takes me being the bad guy by highlighting the connection, by saying I’ll prosecute parents for truancy, I’ll do it,” she said at the time.
Then-California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger made it a state law in 2010 when Harris served as the state’s attorney general.
The law “allowed parents of chronically truant students to be charged with misdemeanors and sentenced to up to a year in jail.”
15 years ago:
13 years ago:
Friday:
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Comments
How about a “get your ass in class or you’ll be held back a year’ approach?
Pain is a great teacher. Pardon the pun.
After a year of their child facing ridicule as a ‘dummy’, both parent and child will shape up.
Do you really want 16 year olds in your child’s third grade class?
Do what Spain did in Franco’s time: school problems were removed from school, stuck in a uniform, and turned into air-cooled spam-fed expendable gun platforms. A high school teacher of mine was a Mexican who spent many years in Franco’s Spain. The sentiment back then was that delinquents were not coddled. They were tossed out of school. “Someone had to peel the potatoes, someone had to clean hotel rooms, someone had to scrub the toilets, and someone had to dig the ditches.”
They won’t shape up.
What if we give them some gumption and stick-to-itiveness? /s
Last year, Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE) published a study on truancy in California. The tl;dr is truancy exists because of ‘race & socioeconomic disparity.’ Like every other liberal think tank in America, this education think tank is absolutely certain this specific problem is rooted in racial disparity and economic inequality. They’re incapable of realizing that racial disparity and economic inequality are DOWNSTREAM of culture. Truancy is a CULTURAL problem, not a money or race problem. When kids don’t show up for class (or the 70% of the ones who do aren’t even close to reading at grade level) of course they’re going to be poor & stupid and produce poor & stupid kids themselves in a few years. It’s a death spiral born ENTIRELY of cultural deficiencies.
When Germans, Italians and Irish flooded the country in the 19th century, they built primary, secondary schools and great universities. Why? Because the culture they were bringing with them to this country placed great emphasis on education. The Chinese are the exact same way which is why truancy isn’t a problem with that demo.
In any event, at least they acknowledge that truancy is a crisis, nationally but particularly in CA. They say:
The number of students who are chronically absent from school has doubled nationwide since the pandemic began, increasing from one out of six students in the 2018–19 school year to nearly one out of three students by the end of the 2021–22 school year (Chang et al., 2022). In California, 30 percent of students—nearly 1.8 million—were chronically absent during the 2021–22 school year. This is more than twice the 12.1 percent of students chronically absent during 2018–19.
A 1st-world country cannot remain a 1st-world country when a third or more of its citizens are functionally illiterate.
sounds like she did the right thing …what was the reaction in the poc districts to this and was it also enforced there???
closing down publicly funded education would be the answer as you would pay teachers directly and avoid 99% of alll these problems
Kamala has no lived experience with producing prospectively truant babies.
If children are skipping school before they learn to read, then it is indeed a parenting problem and the parent should be held responsible.
High school? Parents have little or no influence here, particularly in single parent POC homes.
But the weird claim that not finishing school makes a kid more likely to be a homicide VICTIM? Perpetrator, sure, loser-ville life, you bet but I don’t see the correlation with victimhood.
I assume it’s because becoming a successful violent thug involves an unusually steep learning curve.
If schools would set themselves up to actually educate students instead of shoving them through the “school to prison” pipeline, there would be more motivation for kids to be in class.
“Though part of her strategy involved threatening parents with jail time, her office didn’t actually send any to jail.”
Of course not, because then she would have had to spend her own money to bail them outl