Parents Jailed for Letting Slacker Kids Remain Truant
Jefferson County, Alabama isn’t fooling around when it says it wants students in school getting their education on. School officials there haven’t hesitated to haul parental asses in to court when mom and dad have failed to do their job of getting their kids to school. Mind you, we’re not talking about the occasional tardy, but about students who have missed 15 or more days of school without even so much as an attempt at a lame excuse. The court system in Jefferson County is only hauling in parents for kids under 12, in order to try and nip parental complacency in the bud before it becomes a lifelong habit.
Back when I wrote for Blogging Baby, I covered a lot of these truancy crackdown stories, such as the Virginia mom whose kid missed 65 days. One of the worst cases was in Britain, where Barbara Woodall ended up with a court-ordered electronic monitoring bracelet because her moppets only attended 16 days out of the entire school year. It’s one thing to homeschool or unschool your kids, folks; it’s another to no-school them. It makes me think that there ought to be an expedited system for parents who aren’t going to expend any effort raising their children, so that we can get these kids into the hands of people who give two shits about their futures.
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September 7th, 2006 at 9:40 am
You’ll probably accuse me of being an anarchist (again!) but I’m totally opposed to mandatory attendance laws. If the kid flat out does not want to be in school, his being forced to spend the day there does nothing to advance his education. He will not learn much by osmosis, and he will likely interfere with the kids that are trying to learn something. The only three things that everybody really has to know in order to survive in the world is how to read, write, and handle some basic math. Everything else is an elective. Find something else for the delinquents to do so that they are not wasting their time, and everybody else’s, by being in school.
If the kid wants to be in school, and the parent interferes, that is a different issue, and in that case, I agree with you in that the parent is criminally negligent.
September 7th, 2006 at 9:44 am
Actually, if we’re talking teens, then I tend to agree. Let those kids slack off if they choose, so that the teachers can concentrate on teaching kids who want to learn. But a kid who’s under 12? That’s just negligence.