Customizing a Tough Truancy Plan for L.A. : Monrovia policy may be right for the city--with some changes

In Monrovia, folks are rather serious about following the rules, especially when the rules apply to students who skip school.

There, the City Council passed an ordinance last September that allows police to ticket unsupervised youths ages 12 to 17 who are not in school between 8:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. The students must appear in Juvenile Traffic Court with a parent or guardian. That will get an adult’s attention. Failure to appear results in an arrest warrant for the youths, and suspension of their driver’s licenses.

Those found guilty of skipping school face a fine of $135 or 27 hours of community service. As of early last month, each of the 26 truants so cited had chosen the community service route, doing everything from graffiti removal to filing library books. What happens if students renege on the community service agreement? Well, those age 16 and older can lose their driver’s license. Those younger can lose the right to apply for a license.

Police like it because it’s quick and easy. Instead of having to haul wayward students in for truancy, they can sometimes just write out a ticket and resume their patrols. And if police have to give up as much as a minute over a one-hour time limit for detaining arrested youth, a provision of the ordinance allows them to bill the students’ parents. Like we said, they don’t play around in Monrovia, and the law in those parts is one of the first of its kind in California.

Now, City Councilwoman Laura Chick has introduced legislation that would allow similar penalties for truant students in Los Angeles. “I’m just trying to reduce the truancy rate in an effective way,� Chick says. And she has the backing of school board President Mark Slavkin, who added, “It will send a message to parents and students that we take this issue seriously.�

Chick’s proposal deserves serious consideration for several reasons. It was more than a year ago on this page, for example, that we wrote about Valley parents who allowed their children to skip school for family vacations. And there were the so-called “casual school attenders� who took advantage of loose Los Angeles Unified School District attendance policies.

We have some concerns, however, that ought to be addressed.

First, it’s one thing to enforce such a matter in Monrovia, where there might be 25 or 30 truants on an average school day, and another thing entirely to take it on in Los Angeles. On any given day here, 4% of the student body is truant, and that works out to about 25,600 pupils on the streets. That’s nearly the size of a couple of U. S. Army divisions.

We doubt that the city’s juvenile courts are prepared for such a potential deluge of new cases. Since this is a law that would have to involve both police officials and the courts, it would behoove the council to make certain its plan is workable.

Also, when you are talking about the possibility of thousands of youths receiving penalties of community service, there has to be some means in place for effectively monitoring all that, and referring them to programs in need. Monrovia was small and manageable. Los Angeles is anything but that.