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