FLINT, Mich. (AP) - Flint children under the age of 17 will be banned from public places during daytime hours under a new ordinance approved by the City Council.
The curfew will be in effect from 9:00 to 2:00 on school days. It goes into effect in about a month.
Councilman Sheldon Neeley says statistics show that more than 60 percent of Flint ninth graders will not graduate.
The ordinance allows police to arrest a child who is supposed to be in school. Parents who do not pick up their child within three hours of being notified would be guilty of a misdemeanor.
Parents also must pay the cost of arresting and detaining the child if he or she is convicted. A proposal that would have allowed police officers to return truant students to school was defeated.
Shades of the Islamic habit of not allowing women outside of their home without an adult escort come to mind. So, I wonder where this leaves homeschoolers and emancipated minors. Most likely they are going to be fair game for any police officer who is looking to make his quota, thanks to the far-sighted legislation passed by the esteemed city council of Flint.
It is really nothing more than a way for them to rip off the public, to make more money at the expense of young people and their parents. If a school system has a sixty percent failure and drop out rate, that is a problem that goes well beyond truancy. At that point, it is a cultural and institutional problem. What the city would be better off doing would be to ramp up law enforcement of other criminal activities and scaling back welfare benefits for those who don't even bother to graduate from high school. Taking away the "safety net" from people who don't even care about being productive citizens would help.
This will definitely make for the old "Ver are yoor pahpaz" situation. Even people who look young, but who are in fact over eighteen will be harassed by the police as they try to enforce this law. And just remember, the city council clearly doesn't care about simply forcing kids to go to school; if they did, they wouldn't have passed up on sending the kids and teens back to school instead of using them to ransome some cash out of their parents.
Note: Normally I don't post an entire story out of respect for the original writer, so that they can get a hit, but this one was too small for me to not post the entirety of the article.
That sure is messed up. Especially since the families most likely to have truant children are also most likely not to be able to afford to pay the fines - which means the tax-payers are ultimately the ones that will pay for it.
Wish they'd put as much effort into fixing their education system. Oh, and lock up the truants if they skip classes more than once. Have them spend a day and a night in jail. Then let them decide which they like best, school or incarceration. These kids need to be set right, and obviously their parents don't care enough to discipline them.
Pablo, mandatory schooling only ends up punishing those who take their education seriously. Obviously sixty percent of these students or more don't take it seriously. I bet that if you allowed these fools to drop out peacefully and work in bad jobs for a few years, that the problem would start to resolve itself within a generation or so. If you force these idiots to take part in the education system, all they'll do is continue to tear down the classroom experience.
Nice try with less than enough thought put behind such a drastic measure.
Let us bandaid everything.
MikeT,
I think you missed the point again. This is not about revenue generation, just "fell good" legislating.
I can't imagine police in Detroit putting any energy into enforcing this.
As you point out, the schools only want them back on attendance day (once a year in Detroit), to keep their federal checks coming in.
Lots of communities have truancy laws, very few make any attempt at enforcement. Existing laws are usually just legacy laws that no one has bothered to repeal.
The article makes no mention of this being a single day of the year or anything like that, Roci. It's a policy that applies for the entire school year. Was there a feel good aspect of this? I don't deny that, but if you notice the fine print, that they defeated a measure that would have actually sent the kids back to the school (what a real, "feel good law" would have done) then it's pretty starkly naked as a revenue raiser and justification to harass people.
I don't doubt that the police will hardly care about this law, but it will be another "tool" for them to use when they need to use it. I think you are giving the counsel too much credit that they really cared enough to pass a law that was a genuine "feel good law."
Feeling good is about talking. legislators talk with their pens.
They used the magic words "truancy laws", then the fine print no longer matters.
The one day only issue is an aside, not a main point. The fact is that schools do not want truants back, except on one day a year. See point #4
OOps,
got cut off.
See point 41 here for info about "count day".
http://www.mackinac.org/article.aspx?ID=4220
Interesting point, but I fail to see how your comments disprove my argument that it's a revenue raiser at the expense of the students. If they use this law to add more teeth to the enforcement on attendance day, it's still being used for revenue raising. On top of that, let's say that you have a few enterprising bureaucrats or cops that want to make a quota. They can still use this law to quickly extort some revenue from parents of truant kids and teens. Even if that happens to not end up being the case, you still have the fact that they are sending kids and teens to jail, not back to class. I doubt that that distinction will be lost on many parents in that area.
The proof will be in the enforcement.
Most police look at enforcing truancy laws on inner city youths as a form of self-harrasment. The whole concept is too stupid to get many people to go along with it.
If police themselves were paid by a percentage of the fines, you would definitely have a point. Heck, If private people could get a percentage, I would get into the truancy enforcement business. The only more sure way to raise cash would be a bounty on illegal aliens. I could hire my own bus on that kind of scratch.
I don't expect them to turn it into a speed trap replacement or something like that. However, the law clearly has no component in it that is aimed at actually really getting students to stay in school. Chances are, many of the ones that they are "worried about" are the type of young people who wouldn't care if their parents got in trouble with the law because they were truant.