Fact Checker: Kamala Harris’s careful answer on jailing parents whose kids missed school
By Salvador Rizzo Salvador Rizzo Reporter for The Fact Checker Email Bio Follow March 29 at 3:00 AM Terrell Jermaine Starr, the Root: “Obviously, people have been talking about your time as a prosecutor and attorney general, et cetera. You supported a law that would send parents to jail if their children missed too many days of school. No parents were jailed. But I think the issue people are concerned with this is that that was a consideration in order to deal with the truancy issue.
On the presidential campaign trail these days, Harris strikes a softer tone when she’s asked about her “anti-truancy” initiative. She notes that school attendance rates improved and that no parents were jailed in San Francisco, where she was district attorney from 2004 to 2011. Harris would send yearly letters to all parents in the San Francisco school district, informing them that truancy was against the law. Prosecutors from her office would hold mediation sessions with parents and truant students. If that failed, Harris’s office would prosecute parents in a specialized truancy court. It was an extreme measure, Harris indicated, and penalties included a fine of up to $2,500 or up to one year in jail.
The California law’s harshest penalties allow for jailing parents up to one year if their children have unexcused absences for at least 10 percent of schooldays, along with fines up to $2,000. HuffPost reported Wednesday that Kings County has charged “19 misdemeanors under Harris’ law in the past four years,” while Orange County has “charged a total of 22 parents under Harris’ law.”
The Harris report recommended that parents be “imprisoned for truancy violations in only the most extreme cases — it is both traumatic for children and families and costly for taxpayers.”
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