Hearings begin on Monday in a push to persuade the Los Angeles City Council to amend the LA’s daytime curfew law and so end truancy fines for students. Research shows the fines to be spectacularly ineffective in reducing school absences—and they cut against poor and minority students.

Today a large number of parents and advocates are expected to pack the Council’s 10 am Public Safety Committee meeting to show support for the amendment. (Not that there’s any danger of the proposed motion passing out of committee, as the committee’s chair Tony Cardenas, is a vocal supporter of the amendment, along with Bernard Parks, the So Cal ACLU, the Children’s Defense Fund, and the Youth Justice Coalition, among others.

An impressive new report details strategies to improve school attendance in LA’s school, and shows what combination of programs and structures have been notably successful in schools in other districts at —and high priced truancy tickets ain’t one of those efficacious strategies.

Susan Ferris from the Center for Public Integrity has an excellent article on the topic.

Here’s a clip for Ferris’s story:

Fifteen-year-old Juan Carlos Amezcua was just five minutes late for school, and already at the corner by Theodore Roosevelt High School in Los Angeles when a police cruiser’s siren went off last Nov. 16.

The consequences of what happened next — handcuffing, allegations of rough treatment and a $250 daytime curfew ticket — are still resonating here. In January, Amezcua and his cousin, who was also stopped by police en route to school, saw their tickets dismissed in juvenile court. Still upset at their encounter with police, though, the pair and their parents filed a complaint on Feb. 3 with the school district and police concerning officers’ behavior.

Meanwhile, the presiding judge of Los Angeles’ juvenile court and Los Angeles city leaders are also moving to curtail law-enforcement involvement in policing student attendance.

The dispute is indicative of a broader, complex and, at times, racially charged debate over how best to deal with tardy or truant students in jurisdictions across the country. Since the 1990s, cities large and small have adopted daytime curfews with monetary fines to force kids to get to school. Now the City of Angels is at ground zero as the impact of such ordinances in reconsidered.

Next Monday, the Los Angeles City Council’s Public Safety Committee starts a review of proposed amendments to that city’s nine-year-old daytime curfew law. Among the proposals: setting limits on enforcement by police, who routinely search youths and sometimes handcuff them. The proposed amendments would also effectively end $250 fines in favor of negotiated agreements that tardy students submit to counseling…

Officers detaining students for truancy in 2010, Brad Graverson/Torrance Daily Breeze

To be exact, Supervisor Gloria Molina tossed two G-words in Sheriff Baca’s direction during Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting when she was questioning the sheriff about the Sheriff’s Department’s progress—or lack thereof—-in implementing the recommendations made last October by Special Counsel Merrick Bobb and the Office of Independent Review relating violence in Baca’s troubled jails.

Among other things, Molina and Supervisor Mike Antonovitch wanted to know whether the sheriff was able to institute a plan in which deputies would be stuck for fewer years working in the jails before they are rotated to street patrol. (The existing multi-year tenure working the jails after young deputies first graduate from the Sheriff’s academy has long been flagged by Bobb and other experts as problematic.) Molina also asked about whether deputies had stopped using their heavy flashlights as batons to whack inmates, and if the camera’s were properly installed at Men’s Central Jail and Twin Towers facilities, and, if so, had they been successful in capturing videos of any of the use of force incidents at CJ that have occurred since the installation.

The answers that the sheriff gave in response to many of the questions seemed mostly to amount to some version of “we’re working on it.”

For example, in terms of the cameras, of the 674 needed in Men’s Central Jail, according to the Sheriff’s report, more than half still have to yet to be installed or need to be replaced. At Twin Towers, according to the report, none of the 677 have been installed as yet.

As for the flashlights, the only progress made in nearly 2 1/2 months had been to schedule a meeting withe ALADS and the PPOA, the two deputies unions, to talk about the issue.

All this did not please Molina, so she marched out the first of her G-words: garbage.

“You know, Sheriff, you’re providing these reports and it’s all in the same tone. It’s like I’m going to give you all this garbage, and you can just take this garbage and shove it around however you want. I don’t think you’re taking us very seriously. I’m very disappointed.

“To the contrary,’ retorted the Sheriff. “I don’t think you’re taking what I’m saying seriously.”

But Molina didn’t back off and, instead, pulled out the second and largest G-word: Gobbledygook.

“I am [taking you seriously], and I’ve been listening and reading your reports. And I’ve asked questions about them. And that’s why we’re asking questions now. …Don’t give me Gobbledygook that you can’t get……

“I object to you referring..….” interrupted Baca…

And so it went.

(You can read a copy of the Sheriff’s report to the board on the various recommendations and actions here.)

Here’s KPCC Frank Stoltz’s rundown on the Molina/Baca verbal kerfuffle.

SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT REPORT SHOWS THAT USES OF FORCE IN JAILS ARE MORE LIKELY TO BE USED AGAINST MENTALLY ILL INMATES.

At the same Board of Supervisors meeting, Sheriff Baca reported to the Supes that his own jails task force, formed last fall, had determined that deputies were more liable to use force on mentally ill inmates. He asked for additional $1.3 million dollars to hire specialized deputies and social workers to better address the problem.

Here’s a clip from the LA Times story on the issue:

Roughly a third of the 582 deputy use-of-force cases in the jail system last year involved inmates with mental health histories, according to an analysis released Tuesday. About 15% of the jail’s 15,000 inmates are classified as mentally ill.

The numbers provide a more detailed picture of the confrontations between deputies and inmates, an issue that has sparked intense scrutiny over the last few months and prompted a heated debate Tuesday between Sheriff Lee Baca and some L.A. County supervisors.

FOUR SHERIFF DEPUTY TRAINEES FILE LAWSUIT TUESDAY AND ACCUSE THEIR LASD SUPERVISORS OF TAMPERING WITH EVIDENCE AND OTHER MISCONDUCT

Also on Tuesday, Civil rights attorney Leo Terrell announced the filing four lawsuits against the Sheriff’s department alleging criminal conduct and discrimination.

KPCC’s Corey Moore reports:

Terrell says the plaintiffs testified at recent depositions they saw training officers at two L.A. County stations commit crimes that include falsifying and destroying evidence and filing false police reports.

The plaintiffs claim that after speaking up about the wrongdoing, officers retaliated by, among other things, forcing them to work up to 20 hours without overtime pay.

ABC’s Rudabeh Shahbazi also has a report on the serious accusations.

(NOTE: We will have more on this issue as we get further details.)

AND IN NON-LASD NEWS—PUBLIC COUNSEL, THE ACLU AND OTHERS SCORE A VICTORY ON THE ISSUE OF STUDENT CURFEW TICKETS.

This is very good news. Here are some clips from the ACLU’s press release on the matter:

Students with tickets for being late to school faced hundreds of dollars in fines and were forced to miss more school time to appear in court.

Now Los Angeles’ top judge for juvenile courts [Judge Michael Nash] has released new guidelines to eliminate fines and unnecessary court time for students who were late to school and for other minor offenses. The court will also direct students who miss school to school- and community-based resources that are shown to improve academic achievement and get struggling students back on track.

It’s the latest step forward to reforming Los Angeles daytime curfew rules and truancy ticketing.

….Data collected by Public Counsel, the ACLU of Southern California, and the Community Rights Campaign shows that truancy and tardy ticketing unfairly and disproportionately targets African American and Latino students and their families, and results in more student time out of school and significant financial burdens on low-income families.

City Councilman Tony Cardenas has also been working for the last two years to reform the city’s student truancy policies.

Earlier this year, the LAPD and LA’s School Police Department dialed back the number of tickets written to students on their way to school.

Photo by Corey Moore/KPCC

This week is the National Week of Action on the issue of school discipline. Studies have found that the chronic overuse of school suspensions, expulsions, truancy tickets, and other forms of student sanctions, does more harm than it does good.  At LAUSD as well as schools across the country, a growing dependency on punishment pushes kids to drop out, and  affects minority kids disproportionately, as this Talk of the Nation report indicates. (Also see WLA post on the topic.)

The LA event that is part of the week-long national effort will take place Wednesday night at the California Endowment. . It is called: Punishing our Future: School Discipline in Los Angeles. Admission is free, but it requires reservations.

In the meantime, to give you an idea of what is at stake, take a look at this essay by two very articulate young LA women, Claudia Gomez and Leslie Mendoza, edited by Annette Fuentes, author of Lockdown High.

POSITIVE SCHOOL ENVIRONMENTS, NOT METAL DETECTORS ARE THE KEY TO STUDENT SUCCESS

By Claudia Gomez and Leslie Mendoza

Graduating from high school is the dream of most L.A. students. We understand that education and a diploma can make the difference between a healthy, successful future and a dead-end job, or worse, the criminal justice system.

But just getting to and staying in school can be a daily struggle, especially for those of us coming from the poorest communities. And when we arrive at campus, we often feel unwelcome and unmotivated in a climate where police and parole officers may outnumber counselors, and teacher layoffs create overcrowded classes.

It starts on the way to school. The trip could mean walking through five or more neighborhoods, each with its own dramas, including drug and gang violence.

A monthly bus pass costs $24, a big expense for families, and when buses are full, they will pass you by. A late bus could mean arriving at school after the bell rings and getting a $250 truancy ticket from the police just for being a few minutes late. And then you have to miss more school to go to court, the only way the truancy ticket fine can be reduced.

Arriving at school, we may be greeted by a security guard or police officer, sometimes metal detectors, and gates that lock behind us when the bell rings. The police can enter classrooms, at the principal’s direction, to do random searches of our belongings, using metal detector wands. They’ve even used dogs to sniff our lockers for drugs. It’s not violence from our classmates that worries us. It’s the prison-like conditions that make us feel unsafe.

Teachers and principals use suspensions too freely, sending students out of class for behaviors they label as “willful defiance,” a catch-all term in the state Education Code that can be used as a reason to remove students without explanation for what that actually means.

If we are late to class, their attitude often is, “Why bother being here? Just go home.” They don’t realize that for many L.A. public school students, school is a safer haven than their own homes, a place to escape the problems in their families. We stay in school because we don’t want to get in trouble. If we aren’t welcomed in school, where can we go?

We are calling attention to this issue as part of the National Week of Action on school discipline, taking place Oct 1-7 in 25 cities across the U.S., including Los Angeles. It’s time to raise awareness about the overuse of truancy tickets and other forms of harsh school discipline that are on the rise in California and across the nation, and that research has shown don’t help schools become safer and more successful.

A quality education is our ticket to great possibilities, but L.A.’s schools are failing in their mission to educate. Aggressive policing in and around schools, high suspension rates and a basic lack of respect for students by staff create the conditions that have the effect of pushing out students who most need to stay in school. For too many of us, this results in being pushed into the juvenile justice system.

We call on the Los Angeles Unified School District to address the challenges students face in staying in school. Fully fund “safe passages to school” programs to make the trip to school easier and more secure. Instead of more law enforcement on campus, invest in counseling and programs like restorative justice that hold students accountable for misbehavior instead of simply kicking them out. Make sure that youth who have been in the juvenile justice system get enrolled in school once they are released, with all the support services they need to succeed.

And make the school-wide positive behavior supports policy, adopted in 2007 as an alternative to harsh and “automatic” zero-tolerance discipline, a reality.

In a school climate where students are treated with respect, and expectations are high, we will respond by respecting teachers and administrators and reaching our full potential. Help us stay in school so we can walk across the stage, diploma in hand, and into a brighter future.

Claudia Gomez, 20, and Leslie Mendoza, 16, are members of Youth Justice Coalition, a youth advocacy group that promotes reforms to LA educational policies and the juvenile justice system.