This actually makes me support her more. Parents are doing their children extreme harm by holding them out of school and they should be punished for doing so.
The most truant kids aren’t 14 year old white middle class suburbanites being rebels because of bad parenting like you clearly think they are.
They are kids in unstable low income households. The last thing kids in those types of households need is a fine their family can’t afford or their parents taking a stint in jail.
And the best thing for those kids is to be in school. Withholding school from kids, whether they be at the elementary, middle, or high school level is as close to abuse (without mentally or physically harming them) as you can get.
You act as if the parents are intentionally withholding school from these kids, when they aren't most of the time.
Also, considering there's mountains of research showing that truancy laws don't lower truancy and actually are possibly counterproductive, there's clearly better ways to deal with it than putting parents in jail.
We can have a discussion about what kind of consequences there should be, but there should definitely be consequences. Kids should be in school, it is as simple as that. Also, I do not believe they are withholding their children for nefarious reasons but due to negligence.
