Anyone who lives in a city of any size knows that truancy has become a major problem in our society. In many cities, as much as 10% of high school and middle school students are serial truants. They are blowing their opportunity for a free education and a passport to a decent life, and many of them will wind up a drain on society -- as criminal inmates, welfare recepients, or spend their lives bouncing between minimum wage jobs and unemployment.
Many cities, including the one I live in, are trying to solve this problem by putting pressure on the parents. The parents of serial truants are fined, sent to parenting classes and even jailed. This may have been a good idea, but it is simply not having the desired result. If a parent doesn't have control of their child by the time they are in middle school, then they probably never will.
But a judge in Midland (Texas) has shifted the focus of the attack on truancy in his city and seems to be having some success. Judge David Cobos (pictured above) is holding the truants responsible for their own actions -- not the parents.
He is fining the serial truants, and making them pay their own fines instead of their parents. If that doesn't work, the next step is an ankle monitor. Those fitted with a monitor are allowed to go only to school and back home, and they are monitored 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Jail is in store for those who ignore the ankle monitor. The best part is that by making these students responsible for their own actions, he is having an 80% success rate. That's remarkable!
The judge has also raised private funds to help rectify issues raised by poverty. For instance, one male student was skipping school because he had to wear his older sister's hand-me-down shoes (pink tennis shoes) and the other students were making fun of him. The judge tapped the fund to buy the student his own shoes and the problem was solved.
Not everyone likes the judge's approach. The ACLU believes it is a violation of the students privacy. I like the ACLU and usually agree with them, but not on this issue. The students have a right to a free education in this country, but they don't have the right to not go to school. In fact, the law states they MUST go to school.
All of the community's citizens pay taxes to support the right to a free education (even renters). It is not too much to expect the students to obey the law and take advantage of the opportunity they have been given. Judge Cobos is not trying to be mean to these students. He is trying to help them, and he's succeeding with a much larger percentage than most other cities.
I applaud Judge Cobos -- both his methods and his dedication to the welfare of Midland's students.
Thing about these judges in smaller cities, they aren't as interested in the fine masturbatory details of law, and are more interested in results, especially when it comes to kids. In one city that I lived in, they had a big problem with fights in one of the schools. Finally the school principal, the judge, and the chief of police got together and devised a plan: If there was a fight, the cops would show up and take in the kids for disorderly conduct. The kids would be taken in front of the judge, with their parents in tow, and issued a $50 fine for disorderly conduct. Usually the kids would mouth off to the judge. The judge would then hammer his gavel and yell, "contempt of court, that's another $50 fine." The kid would generally say something again, and the judge would then hammer his gavel and yell, "contempt of court *again*, that's another $50 fine." There was never a third time, because the kid's parent by that time had his or her arm firmly affixed across the kid's mouth so all he could do was mutter "muh muh muh muh muh muh!".
ReplyDeleteIt was a drastic solution to violence in that school, but it worked. I talked to one of the other students (this was back in my librarian days) and he said that if someone swung on you, you ran like hell rather than swinging back because if you got into a fight the cops would just scoop the whole mess of you up and you got to go before Judge Melancon. Sad to say, this is an approach that wouldn't have worked in a big city with hundreds of city magistrates and thousands of cops. This small city, the cops knew the judge and the judge knew the cops and the principal of the school and it all worked out. Big cities get too... impersonal... for that kind of thing.
- Badtux the Law Penguin