California showed progress in some areas, such as health insurance, school discipline and absenteeism.
Allison Yin/EdSource
Top takeaways
- Bill seeks to repeal criminal misdemeanor offense of state’s truancy law.
- CalWORKs sanctions over student truancy would be replaced by screenings for resources and access to work program.
- Districts in recent years appear less likely to lean on punitive measure to address unexcused student absences.
In 2011, when criminal penalties were first tied to truancy, five parents in Orange County were arrested for their children’s truancy. Other counties similarly chose the punitive approach over the years, with Merced County initiating an anti-truancy push in 2017 that included the arrest of 10 parents. Those parents were charged with misdemeanors, contributing to the delinquency of a minor.
If a proposed bill is passed this legislative session, jail time and fines of up to $2,000 for parents of truant students could soon be eliminated in California.
Assembly Bill 461, introduced by Assemblymember Patrick Ahrens, D-Silicon Valley, would repeal the criminal misdemeanor offense of the existing truancy law, meaning that parents of truant students, 6 years of age or older, in grades 1-8, would no longer be punished by fines or up to a year in county jail.
The bill proposes an additional change: families receiving cash assistance via the California Work Opportunity and Responsibility to Kids program, known as CalWORKs, would no longer be penalized if a student aged 16 years or older is chronically truant. The current penalty requires that a truant child is removed from the calculation of the family’s monthly cash assistance.
“Criminalizing parents for their children’s truancy ignores the root causes of absenteeism and only deepens family hardships,” said Ahrens in his author’s statement.
Under the state’s truancy law, parents of habitually absent students were previously arrested, but it remains unclear how many cases resulted in criminal charges in the nearly 15 years since it went into effect.
State law dictates that a district can declare a student truant and refer them to the district attorney after three unexcused absences of more than 30 minutes during one school year.
Once a student’s case is referred to the district attorney, prosecutors have wide discretion over how to charge parents for their child’s truancy, from an infraction – akin to a traffic violation, to a misdemeanor – contributing to the delinquency of a minor.
In California, the percentage of chronically absent students catapulted from the pre-pandemic rate of 12.1% in 2018-19 to 30% in 2021-22, as schools reopened for in-person instruction. The percentage has since dropped to about 20% in 2023-24, according to state data, though rates range widely across student groups.
State education law lists over a dozen reasons for excusing students from school, but most excused absences are related to illness and mental health. Unexcused absences often mean that students lacked documentation such as a note from a doctor, or that they provided no reason for their absence, or that the reason they provided does not qualify as an excusable absence, school officials say.
Districts often try to avoid punitive measures
There is no central repository tracking truancy cases, but EdSource found last year that school districts have increasingly gone to great lengths to avoid referring chronically truant students to the local district attorney. Instead, they opt for alternatives such as sending more notifications to parents after a student’s absence than what’s required by law, or scheduling multiple meetings between parents and school staff to better understand and address the underlying reasons for frequent absences.
The decision by districts to lean into alternatives rather than available punitive measures is partly why Ahrens and AB 461’s supporters are pushing to change the law.
“If we’re not prosecuting these cases…then why should we have this in the books? We don’t need the stick if everything else is already working to the benefit of our families,” said Yesenia Jimenez, senior policy associate at End Child Poverty CA, an advocacy organization that co-sponsored the bill.
Eleven organizations have expressed support for the bill, with three of them co-sponsoring, and there is no listed opposition as of Monday.
Early conversations about Assembly Bill 461 focused solely on the link between public benefits and chronic truancy, Jimenez said.
CalWORKS provides cash assistance to families with unmet basic needs, such as housing, food, or medical care. Monthly grants range in amounts dependent on region, income, and the number of eligible family members, with the average monthly grant being about $1,000 during the 2024-25 fiscal year, according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office.
Provisions of the proposed law
AB 461 also proposes changes to the CalWORKS program, including:
- Entirely eliminating the financial sanction on families if students are deemed truant
- Making a family with a truant child eligible for family stabilization services and allowing a student 16 years or older to voluntarily participate in CalWORKS’ welfare-to-work program, so long as their participation supports and does not interfere with school attendance
- Qualifying families for stabilization services if they’re undergoing homelessness, undertreated behavioral needs, and including individual or group therapy, temporary housing assistance and parenting education among the services they receive
- Granting access to resources such as substance abuse services, vocational education, and mental health services to a truant student aged 16 years or older who opts into the welfare-to-work program
Jimenez, whose team researched the sharp rise in chronic absenteeism at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, said they knew the rates were steadily decreasing each school year.
While AB 461 began as a way to reform public benefits programs, the team behind the bill began to more heavily consider the criminal penalties families might face as a result of truancy once the Trump administration ramped up actions targeting immigrants, Jimenez shared.
“Now we’re just facing a completely other beast in the sense that our families are afraid to go to school because we’re seeing (the Department of Homeland Security) show up at elementary schools attempting to deport families, and families have already been subject to deportation,” she said, referring to a case early this month when immigration officials seeking information about five students in first through sixth grades were denied entry at two Los Angeles Unified elementary schools.
With the provisions of the proposed bill, supporters are looking to circumvent immigrant families from being penalized for school absences due to fear of immigration officials.
In Southern California this month, an undocumented father was arrested while leaving home to drive his teenage daughter to school. Some advocates have compared the ordeal to the 2017 arrest of an undocumented father who similarly was detained by ICE during a morning school drop-off.
“We don’t want (truancy) to be the reason why our families, who we’re trying to protect, could be essentially pipelined not only into the carceral system but certainly into the deportation system at this point in time,” said Jimenez.
Some families opted to keep their children home from school early this year in Kern County after the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol arrested 78 people. At least 40 have been deported, according to a lawsuit filed in February.
A bill signed into law last year requires changes to the truancy notifications sent to families by removing threatening language about punitive measures they might be subject to and instead opting for sharing resources about supportive services, including mental health resources.
Advocates for AB 461 agree with the premise of the bill, said Jimenez, but they wish to go further in removing the potential for arrest.
AB 461 most recently passed through the Committee on Human Services and on Tuesday will be heard by the Committee on Public Safety.