Detention for truancy used to mean sitting in a classroom after school while your friends went out to play.
In West Virginia, especially for the past five years, detention for unexcused absences has too often meant something else entirely: appearing before a magistrate and, in many cases, ultimately being locked up.
For five unexcused absences. In an entire school year.
One in three children was considered truant in the state by 2012, the latest year for which statistics were available, while 40 percent of juvenile court referrals — about 2,750 children — were for truancy.
Now, after an aggressive campaign against the truancy law by the American Civil Liberties Union of West Virginia, state lawmakers have voted to ease the law, perhaps the strictest in the nation.
[For more of this story, written by Gary Gately, go to http://jjie.org/west-virginia-...-truancy-law/108553/]
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