High School Students Fined for Tardiness in L.A.
Have you heard about this?
From Juvenile Justice Information Exchange:
For several years, students in Los Angeles have complained about hefty $250-plus fines for being tardy [under the city’s curfew law], and about police officers who staked out schools to catch students sometimes only minutes late. The ticketing also requires students to go to court, with parents, during school hours, so they miss more class time and parents miss work.
IMHO, laws like this are backwards — they allow for the criminalization of children and ultimately, keep kids away from the classroom. I feel similarly about other disciplinary methods, like in-school suspension. Public Counsel and the ACLU agree:
From the Business Insider:
Activists from the ACLU say the law does the exact opposite of what city councilmembers would like to believe.
Instead of encouraging school attendance, they allege it’s unfairly targeting low-income and minority students who would rather skip school altogether than burden their family with yet another bill to pay.
“They are criminalizing kids for coming to school late,” Laura Faer, education rights director for Public Counsel, a nonprofit public interest law firm, said. “It’s backward in every way.”
I understand the intention behind the laws, but they’re just not working in the right way and students and community members have been up in arms about it. For this reason, the L.A. City Council will vote next week to make amendments to the curfew law.
The curfew amendments — if they get full city council approval on Feb. 22 — would replace the $250 fines with graduated penalties emphasizing counseling. Students ticketed once or twice would be required to participate in an attendance-improvement plan or in counseling or community service. If ticketed a third time, the ordinance would call for a possible monetary fine whose amount is still being negotiated, said Michael de la Rocha, legislative deputy to Los Angeles City Council member Tony Cardenas, who sponsored the amendments.
Cardenas wanted to end all fines, and would prefer capping a third-strike fine at $20, which in reality would end up costing students more, given extra fees that get tacked on, de la Rocha said.
As of January, Los Angeles’ students won’t be required to pay monetary fines — for now — regardless of what the city council does. Last month, Michael Nash, the county’s presiding juvenile court judge, instructed all court officers to stop imposing daytime curfew fines on ticketed students throughout the county and instead order them to show improved attendance, or, if that fails, mandatory counseling or community service.
Interesting. Thoughts?