Free Republic

A 17-year-old high school student working two jobs to support her siblings, while juggling college-level classes, spent 24 hours in jail this week for missing too much school, KHOU 11 News reported. Diane Tran, an 11th-grader at Willis High School in Willis, Texas said she was often too exhausted to get to school in time. Judge Lanny Moriarty said he warned the student last month not to miss any more classes or she would be violating truancy law, KHOU 11 News reported. When she missed school again, he had her thrown in jail. "If you let one run loose, what...

Thanks to a controversial legislative maneuver, Wisconsin's Republican Governor Scott Walker's plan to end collective bargaining for his public employees passed the state senate Wednesday night. Now, in a stunning show of solidarity with their teachers—who, as union members, now have no bargaining rights—Wisconsin's high school students are planning a grassroots school walkout, and they want to take their protest national. Wisconsin Students in Solidarity is asking for the nationwide walkout to happen this Friday, March 11, 2011 at 2:00 p.m. local time. Less than 12 hours after being formed, the Facebook event, Nationwide Student Walkout, has almost 2,000 "attendees"...

Just confirmed on WTMJ, TEACHERS and students from madison West matching on Capitol building. Students carrying signs, nice to know they still have art class. I hope someone in Madison is taking pictures of the teachers, because they need be be terminated. This is the second time they have a led a walkout and illegally removed students from class.

In many ways, Jessamine “Sisy” Brown is a typical high school kid — a student athlete who looked forward to prom and keeps her grades up in the hope of snagging a college scholarship. But Brown, a world champion horseback rider, has found herself in a quandary. Her success as an athlete has caused her trouble at Steele High School, where her numerous absences for competitions have marked her a truant. On Thursday, Brown and her mother, Kimberly Howard, will appear in a Guadalupe County courtroom for a pretrial conference. “I was surprised,” Brown, 17, said about the charge. “I...

DALLAS -- This city is considering joining a rising number of others across the country that are imposing criminal penalties on kids who skip school to hang out at the mall or on local street corners. Such juvenile daytime curfews to combat truancy and crime are drawing protests from groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union and from the parents of homeschooled children who, along with some parents of public-school students, object on grounds that such laws in effect criminalize otherwise law-abiding kids who may have good reasons for not being in school. Daytime-curfew laws have long been popular...

Every day hundreds of thousands of students fail to show up to school, often for no good reason. But in Midland, Texas, one judge has come up with some creative ways to make a difference -- so much so that cities across that state are following his lead. n Midland, about 3,500 students, or 10 percent of the student population, regularly skip school -- and truancy is often a step toward dropping out altogether. For those who habitually miss class, they'll see more than the principal -- they'll end up in front of Judge David Cobos. Cobos is known as...

More than 90,000 of New York City’s elementary school students — roughly 20 percent — missed at least a month of classes during the last school year, with attendance problems most acute in central Brooklyn, Harlem and the South Bronx, according to a report scheduled for release on Tuesday. “Chronic absenteeism in elementary schools is disproportionately a problem in poor and minority communities and it immediately puts students behind their middle-class peers,” concludes the report, by the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School. “The academic pressures build over time and build quickly.” The situation was worse...

Kids With History of Skipping School To Wear Ankle Bracelets Equipped With Satellite Technology (AP) Court authorities here will be able to track students with a history of skipping school under a new program requiring them to wear ankle bracelets using satellite technology. But at least one group is worried the ankle bracelets, with Global Positioning System monitoring, will infringe on students' privacy. Linda Penn, a Bexar County justice of the peace, said she anticipates that about 50 students from four San Antonio-area school districts - likely to be mostly high schoolers - will wear the anklets during the six-month...

SEASIDE, Calif. — A 15-year-old girl who stopped an out-of-control school bus she was riding on was handed a Saturday detention instead because she was skipping school. Marina High School student Amanda Rouse was on a bus with 40 elementary school students Wednesday morning when the driver fell out of her seat after a turn and hit her head. Rouse jumped up and applied the brakes, bringing the bus to a halt after striking two parked cars. No one was injured.

Antiwar protesters lambasted the Berkeley Police Department — accusing officers of knocking them down and stomping them, among other things — at last night's Berkeley Police Review Commission meeting to review a petition regarding police crowd control tactics allegedly used last month on said protesters outside the downtown U.S. Marine Corps recruitment office. Representatives from World Can't Wait, Code Pink, and Berkeley Copwatch talked and showed video clips of demonstrations. The BPD went unrepresented. Commissioner Victoria Urbi announced that she had sent the police chief an invitation on Monday, but that given the short notice he had declared himself unable...

Judge: Truant kids’ parents face jail ASSOCIATED PRESS PENSACOLA — Parents of kids who habitually skip school could find themselves locked up under an aggressive plan to curb truancy in this Florida Panhandle community. Parents who ignore several warnings and offers of help will have to explain to a judge why they shouldn’t face jail time for misdemeanor charges. Escambia County school officials worked with Circuit Judge Ross Goodman to toughen the consequences. “If the parent is not sending the child to school, then I can send the parent to jail,” Goodman said. School officials said 177 of the district’s...

A Marion woman convicted of allowing her 15-year-old son to remain truant for nearly an entire school year says she was home-schooling the child.

Plans made for teacher absences during big immigration protests - An entire school will relocate for a day and classes at other campuses may be combined Monday to cope with teachers calling in sick, school officials said Friday as they prepared for large-scale protests against immigration reform. And as the immigration debate showed no signs of leaving their doorstep, officials in the city's largest school district addressed concerns about a speech given Monday at Tucson High Magnet School in which a speaker said, "Republicans hate Latinos." Tucson Unified School District officials are taking their hardest stance against the walkouts to...

AP) LOS ANGELES The marches against proposed immigration legislation are spreading in Los Angeles. Some 1,500 L.A. students who have walked out of class are gathered outside Los Angeles City Hall. L.A. school district officials said some 1,000 students from Los Angeles High School on the 4600 block of Olympic Avenue have walked out and are reportedly heading toward Hollywood High School on the 1500 block of North Highland Avenue. Hundreds of students have already left Huntington Park High School, some scaling fences that school officials locked to avoid a walkout. L.A. school district spokeswoman Monica Carazo said students have...

WINDSOR, Conn. (AP) -- Windsor High School planned classes today, but senior Dan Marsella didn't plan to be there. "I think it's rude and disrespectful," said Marsella, 17, who is planning to enter the service and hopes to attend the U.S. Naval Academy or the Coast Guard Academy. Instead, Marsella and 15 other students planned to boycott school to attend a memorial program at a local VFW. The high school was delayed at least two hours Friday due to a power outage. "It's a very important day for those who served our country and protected us," he said. Most of...

Bill and Rebecca Hardin sat in a Cypresswood court recently, waiting to find out whether they would be fined as much as $500 each because their son was allegedly truant from school. On the same day, a 17-year-old Spring High student was hauled off to the county jail for at least a day for failing to honor a contractual promise to attend school. And some students who played hooky during the school year are spending days of summer vacation washing school buses under court order. The youths and their parents have been landing before judges as part of an anti-truancy...

Officials believe 26-year-old woman had sex with student. INDIANAPOLIS (AP) -- School officials fired a home-school coordinator after an investigation found she allegedly had sex with a 17-year-old student, authorities said. The 26-year-old was under contract with the Wayne Township school district as a non-teaching staff member, officials said. She served as a type of social worker, coordinating activities between the school and parents or other adults who are responsible for teaching students off-campus. Her job included working closely with students who skip school, cause trouble, struggle with class work or otherwise have problems. She was not a licensed teacher....

How to Avoid High School Gym Class in the USA Hate going to gym1, but need to pass it to graduate2? Need to find a way around this requirement? If your school is run as 'efficiently' as this Researcher's was then this should be no problem. Of course, it may not be immediately apparent. The first thing that you need to remember is that the gym teacher(s)3 is (are) your enemy. In order to defeat an enemy, you need to study them. Ideally this should begin during your freshman year4. Before you plan your escape, you should determine why you...

New Jersey--Daytime Curfew Bill Scheduled for Vote Monday Dear HSLDA members and friends: A daytime curfew bill that has already passed the Senate may have an impact on homeschoolers. The Assembly will probably vote on S155 on Monday, and it is very unlikely it will be defeated. Therefore HSLDA is prepared to help homeschoolers at the local level if problems arise from this legislation. As it is written, it authorizes municipalities to adopt curfew ordinances forbidding public and private school students--but not homeschool students--from being in public places during the hours their school is in session. If the bill...

Author 'really surprised': Several nations with poor attendance do well on academics Heather Sokoloff Canadian teenagers are among the world's worst offenders when it comes to skipping school, with one in four regularly not showing up for class, according to a new report on students' feelings about school. Only Spain, Denmark, Greece, New Zealand and Iceland report higher absentee and tardiness rates among 15 year-olds in the 28 countries surveyed by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Students in the United States are more likely to attend class than their Canadian counterparts, with one in five admitting they...

California legislation sparked concerns parents could face child-abuse chargesProposed legislation that would have equated truancy with child abuse in California raised suspicions among homeschool advocates it represented a fresh attack on home-based education. The legislation, titled SB 950, would have added "habitual truancy" to the definition of child abuse by amending the Welfare and Institutions Code Section 300. According to the language of the bill, it called for children who have up to five unexcused absences from public school to be immediately taken from their family and put into the juvenile court system. Parents would no longer have been given...

LONDON (AP) _ A woman has been jailed for 60 days for failing to stop her teen-age daughters from skipping school _ a punishment that her family called unfair but education officials applauded on Tuesday. Patricia Amos, 43, was sentenced by magistrates at Banbury in southern England last week for not ensuring that her daughters Jackie, 13, and Emma, 15, regularly attended school. It is believed to be the first time that the courts have jailed a parent under powers gained in November 2000, when the maximum penalty for allowing a child to skip school was raised from $1,400 to...

LONDON (AP) _ As part of a truancy crackdown announced Thursday, students in some of Britain's rougher schools will be getting electronic swipe-card IDs to prove they've attended classes. The $95 million government initiative also will include compulsory anger management courses for unruly pupils and intensive sweeps throughout town centers by welfare officers and police to catch truants. More than 50,000 students skip school every day in Britain, and teachers' unions have long campaigned for government help in improving attendance and pupil behavior. Under the new package, some secondary schools will receive funds for the electronic swipe-card systems so pupils...

San Juan Unified School District officials show no sign of yielding in their truancy case against a home-schooling family and, to the contrary, are taking steps to crack down on all home-schooling. Joseph Tucker, the district coordinator of the Student Attendance Review Board plans to address the issue with state education officials next month, seeking to reform and clarify California compulsory education laws, according to the Sacramento Bee. A call to Tucker was not returned. As WorldNetDaily reported last month, Tucker referred the case of Sandra and David Sorensen to the Sacramento County district attorney's office for prosecution. The Sorensens...