Texas’ new truancy law worries schools, courts

On a summer day when she could be just about anywhere else, 15-year-old Brooke Swartz stands next to her mom, wearing cheeky Bart Simpson Converse high-tops and facing a judge. In one hand, Swartz holds a sheaf of papers, including proof that she attended school and a book report on To Kill a Mockingbird.

In her wallet, she has $170 in hard-earned baby-sitting cash that she’ll soon fork over to a court clerk — the first payment on her $229 fine for skipping school with friends.

“I was upset with myself, scared because I have to come to court,” Swartz said after her five-minute truancy hearing, her second court appearance, to answer for 10 unexcused absences during freshman year at Lakeview Centennial High School.

Swartz will return to court in September to settle her fine and turn in logs of her community service efforts. The entire legal episode has her vowing never to skip again.

“I’d rather go to class,” she said.

For Swartz, Texas’ current truancy law, which allows schools to file misdemeanor charges against students who play hooky too often, appears to be working the way its designers hoped. A trip through adult court, with potential adult consequences, got her attention.

But the rules will change when students return to school this fall, and there is widespread disagreement on what to expect.

Right now, school administrators, court personnel and elected officials are wading through nearly 100 pages of a document that was once House Bill 2398 but will become the state’s new truancy law Sept. 1.

It eliminates criminal court hearings and stints in adult jail for repeat truants, requires schools to do more to address attendance problems and allows court involvement only as a last resort.

Supporters applauded the law when it passed, saying it was about time Texas stopped treating school skippers as criminals.

But many of those who work directly with students under the current law worry that they are losing tools that have worked well in cases like Swartz’s. Officials with school districts and the courts fear the move will cost taxpayers more by forcing districts to figure out how to resolve excess unexcused absences.

But more importantly, they say, reducing truancy from a Class C misdemeanor to a civil fine will drive down attendance and push up the dropout rate.

“You’re fixing to lose a lot of children, absolutely,” said Mike Cantrell, a Dallas County commissioner who heard truancy cases as a justice of the peace in the 1980s. “Attendance will go down, and the dropout rate will go up.”

That claim was echoed in emails sent from school officials to Gov. Greg Abbott, urging him to veto the bill. He signed it last month.

“This bill decriminalizes truancy and I worry if it passes that our drop out rates will increase exponentially,” wrote Jennifer Jordan, a high school social studies teacher in the Abilene district.

Big disagreement

But the law’s author, Rep. James White, R-Hillister, and juvenile justice advocates dismiss those claims.

“It’s a canard,” White said. “You have to ask yourself a question: Is that necessarily a reason to criminalize being absent from school? Because someone says or believes that the dropout rate is going to increase?”

Texas Appleseed, a social advocacy group, researched truancy in Texas and found that more than 115,000 truancy cases were filed in 2013 — more than all other states combined. Deb Fowler, the group’s executive director, rejects the notion that criminal prosecution has any effect on attendance.

“There is absolutely no evidence — zero research — that supports such a punitive approach to chronic absence or attendance problems,” she said. “In fact, there is research that shows that court-based interventions are largely ineffective as an intervention.”

In 1995, truancy became a Class C misdemeanor in Texas, and students with 10 unexcused absences in a year were referred to adult courts, usually either justices of the peace or municipal judges, who aren’t required to hold law degrees.

Students could be fined, and if they violated a judge’s orders — by, say, failing to complete community service or return to court — those 17 or older could be jailed.

Students often complied with the fines because judges could also suspend their driver’s licenses. To lift a suspension, they had to come to court and prove the fines were paid.

Information on juveniles and truancy is sketchy at best. No uniform collection method exists, though justices of the peace and municipal judges are supposed to tell the Austin-based Office of Court Administration how many truancy cases are filed.

But since multiple cases might be filed against the same student, the state’s numbers don’t capture how many students are involved. Fort Bend and Dallas counties keep their own data.

BuzzFeed reported this year that at least 1,000 students in Texas have been ordered to jail for truancy charges.

But it’s not clear how many students have actually spent the night in jail or how many of those opted to spend a night in jail to pay off the fine.

Dallas County confirmed to The Texas Tribune that since January 2013, at least 22 students have gone to jail for failing to pay truancy fines. Of those, eight requested jail after a judge determined that they had the ability to pay their fines.

Appleseed was unable to get jail numbers for Dallas County and is locked in an open-records battle with the district attorney’s office. It is also waiting for numbers from Bexar County.

It found that more than 1,300 students were arrested for truancy and truancy-related charges in 13 counties: Brazoria, Harris, Williamson, El Paso, Cameron, Denton, Hidalgo, Nueces, Montgomery, Travis, Tarrant, Collin and Fort Bend.

The law was modified in 2011 through efforts by Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston, so that no child 10 or younger could be fined.

In 2013, a law authored by Whitmire that would have decriminalized truancy passed the Legislature but was vetoed by then-Gov. Rick Perry. This session, legislation passed again and was signed by Abbott.

But even as lawmakers were moving to scale back truancy punishment, Dallas County was trying to make the existing law work better, streamlining the process and putting lawyers in charge.

In 2003, Dallas County established separate truancy courts, all overseen by attorneys as judges. Today, it has five such courts.

Fort Bend County adopted the specialized courts a few years later.

A burden for districts?

Many on the front lines — teachers, school administrators and court personnel — have shied away from commenting publicly now that the law has been signed. Privately, they remain unconvinced of its wisdom.

Students on the fringes will just leave school altogether, they believe. Schools already struggling to address attendance problems will have to fund more staffers to create more programs to abide by the law.

“That’s what it does — throws it back on the school district,” said Debbie Durko, court administrator for the municipal court in North Richland Hills. “They’re being told to do all this extra work, but they’re not given any additional funds.”

Durko said her court is already working with schools to keep students on campus and not in jail. Her court, like many in the state, will meet with lawyers in the next few weeks to receive updates on the law and to redo programs so that they comply come September.

Critics of the current truancy system say that no matter the number of students involved, it unfairly singles out minority and poor students.

Fowler, of Texas Appleseed, which lobbied to decriminalize truancy, says the current law has disproportionately affected low-income, Hispanic, black and disabled students. Some 20 percent of cases filed during the 2013-14 school year involved black students.

Appleseed was among those that filed a complaint with the Justice Department in 2013 about Dallas County, whose truancy courts prosecute the most students — some 36,000 in 2012 alone.

The Justice Department opened a civil investigation in late March. About the time it was announced, Dallas County quietly ended its practice of placing truant students in handcuffs when they did not appear in court. “You will not find an email about it,” one official told the Tribune.

Shortly after the investigation of Dallas County was announced, Fort Bend County halted its truancy cases. The Justice Department has released no findings, but some think the passage of White’s bill will take the sting out of any final report.

This story was originally published July 12, 2015 at 1:05 AM with the headline "Texas’ new truancy law worries schools, courts."