California State Attorney General Kamala Harris and a team of legislators Monday introduced a package of bills to battle chronic student absenteeism, in yet another sign of the growing reexamination of school attendance and discipline policies.
One legislator called his anti-truancy bill the first step in dismantling the school-to-prison pipeline. Another said the new truancy legislation would provide services for chronically absent students and their families, not criminal sentences. And Harris said that asking why children are not in class requires school districts to look more deeply at the lives of their students. “We must be compelled to think about that child in the context of the family,” Harris said.
Comments (0)