Texas Sends Poor Teens To Adult Jail For Skipping School

*According to Texas Appleseed, Latinos have a disproportionate level of truancy. In Texas the FTAS (Failure to Appear in School) rate for Latino students is 63.9%, and the PCN (Parent Contributing to Nonattendance) rate is 63.4%. There’s more, Appleseed reports that the overwhelming majority of kids sent to truancy court are poor. This is the gist of the story: “Many students have found themselves in a teen version of debtors’ prison, locked up because their families did not or could not pay steep fines stemming from their original truancy charge. Moreover, there is evidence that some Texas judges are flouting a law intended to prevent young people from being jailed because their families can’t afford the fines.” VL

By Kendall Taggart and Alex Campbell, BuzzFeed

The 11th-grader in the courtroom wore braces, loved Harry Potter movies, and posted Katy Perry lyrics on Facebook. She also had a bad habit of cutting school, and now, a judge informed her, she owed $2,700 in truancy-related fines. But Serena Vela, who lived in a trailer with her unemployed mother, couldn’t afford to pay.

Serena was offered “jail credit” at a rate of $300 per day. She was patted down, touched “everywhere,” and dispatched to adult lockup, where she would stay for nine days, missing a week and a half of classes. The first school day after she was released, administrators kicked her out.

She had gone to jail because of a law intended to keep kids on the path to graduation. Instead, her high school career was over.

Click HERE to read the full story.