Colorlines, News Report, Posted: Oct 24, 2011

 After a four-year community-led campaign, Los Angeles is moving to replace a punitive anti-truancy policy targeting the city’s most vulnerable school kids with an approach that actually works.

Last week, the Los Angeles School Police Department followed the first steps of the Los Angeles Police. Earlier this year, the LAPD announced that its officers would no longer ticket students within a designated safety zone for the first 90 minutes of the school day. Now, school police officers have promised to do the same. The policy change means that two of the three law enforcement agencies that have a presence in Los Angeles Unified public schools have committed not to ticket students during this time period.

“From our perspective we’re creating greater protections for black and Latino youth in LAUSD schools and supporting ending the criminalization of young people,” said Manuel Criollo, the director of organizing at Los Angeles-based Strategy Center, which spearheaded the campaign.

It used to be standard policy that Los Angeles public school students caught outside of school during the day could be slammed with a $250 ticket for violating daytime curfew laws. In order to resolve the ticket, students and their parents would have to go to court, a disruptive inconvenience that many families could barely afford.

Youth advocates argued that far from being an effective anti-truancy measure, the policy actually discouraged kids from trying to get to school on time, or from going at all.

“Kids were instead getting the message that if I’m going to be five minutes late, if the bus is going to be late, if I have to drop off a sibling at school, then I should just stay at home because we can’t afford that process,” said Laura Faer, directing attorney with Public Counsel’s Children’s Rights Project.

Punitive anti-truancy policies continue to be popular. This year a similar anti-truancy law that allows the state to prosecute parents of students who miss more than ten percent of their classes went into effect at the state level. Read more here.