Schools Fight Truancy by Arresting Parents

March 17, 2005 -- -- As school officials around the country try to crack down on truancy, one thing they're finding is that skipping out seems to run in the family.

So in Michigan, New Mexico and Tennessee, school officials have turned to law enforcement to help them make parents take responsibility for getting their kids to school, and they're doing it by arresting parents of chronically truant children.

In Michigan's Genesee County, Prosecutor David Leyton is behind the effort, which will result in some parents actually going to jail for failing to send their child to school.

Because the problem with truancy is worse than what Leyton originally thought it was, he is taking advantage of a rarely used Michigan law that has been on the books for 20 years. It allows parents of truant children to be put in jail for up to 90 days if they do not change their children's ways.

In the cases with children of elementary school age, it is the parents' fault and they need to be held accountable when they have no good reason for their kids being out, Leyton said.

"Those are the kinds of cases that I don't buy as good excuses," Leyton said. "If you are just too drunk or too stoned or too tired to get out of bed in the morning and take your kid to school, that's unacceptable."

Last month in Detroit, more than 30 parents were arrested and jailed for up to three days.

Prosecutors in the city said they only took the extreme measure after warning the parents first. The parents who were arrested on Feb. 7 had all failed to appear at court hearings on charges of parental school truancy.

Some of the parents who were led away in handcuffs claimed that they and their children were innocent, while other parents had explanations.

"They're not irate, but everyone has a reason or an excuse for it," Detroit Public Safety chief Charles Mitchell said. "They're not happy, because they realize that when they got here that there were going through a legal process."

One arrested mother, who wished to keep her identity concealed, said her daughter "was out ill. I did write a note. I started keeping a copy for myself, so I had no problems, you know. Here it is, almost three years later, and they're saying I received a letter in the mail that there was an outstanding warrant for my arrest."