Premium ContentMouse over Home then click on Premium Content for information.LINCOLN — Lucy Hall used to keep her daughter home from school when severe allergies and asthma laid the girl low.
This year the Lincoln mother plans to take her daughter to school no matter how the girl feels. A school nurse will determine whether the high school freshman is too sick for school.
It's all part of Hall's effort to avoid a repeat of last school year, when the family got entangled by Nebraska's new school attendance laws.
"I'm not going to take any chances again," she said.
In February, after poor health cost her daughter more than 20 days of school, the Lancaster County Attorney's Office filed a truancy petition against the girl, though she made up her work and maintained good grades.
To avoid a trial and the possibility of losing custody, the family agreed to participate in a diversion program that involved weekly home visits from a therapist and meetings every two weeks with juvenile court officials, which the Halls were expected to take off work to attend.
With her allergy season done, Hall's daughter had good attendance this spring. The petition was dismissed in September.
Hall hopes the arrangement with the school nurse will provide enough professional backing to keep this year's allergy season from sending the family back to court.
She also plans to seek changes to the state's school attendance laws.
She'll have plenty of company among Nebraska parents who say the laws reach too far into families' lives and lump good families and troubled ones together.
But they will have to overcome resistance from key state leaders, who have made the reduction of truancy a top priority.
Among them are Gov. Dave Heineman and Nebraska Education Commissioner Roger Breed.
"The bottom line is very clear. If students aren't in school, they can't learn," Heineman said. "As parents and policymakers, we have a responsibility to do everything we can to encourage our young people to stay in school and prepare for the demanding and knowledge-based careers of tomorrow."
Generally a proponent of limited government, Heineman said the attendance laws strike the right balance between parents' rights and the state's interests in getting children to school.
He said he expects officials will implement the laws with "good old Nebraska common sense."
Stephanie Morgan, a Millard mother and leader of the Nebraska Family Policy Forum, said the governor should trust the common sense of Nebraska parents instead.
"At what point are families no longer free to govern themselves?" she asked. "I don't think we should be intervening so often and so readily."
Morgan's group, which initially formed over issues in the Millard schools, started raising concerns about the state attendance laws after parents began feeling the effects of changes passed in 2010.
Dozens of stories similar to the Halls' emerged as the school year went on. The group now has nearly 200 members on its Facebook page.
The new law moved away from a focus on truancy, or unexcused absences, to a broader focus on "excessive absenteeism."
It also shifted responsibility from schools to the legal system for deciding how to respond to absences.
Under the new law, school districts must report to the county attorney all students who accumulate more than 20 absences in a school year. Reports are mandated regardless of the reasons for the absences or whether a school district excused them.
County attorneys decide whether to file a juvenile court petition, either against a student for truancy or a parent for educational neglect.
In addition, schools must develop a policy on excessive absenteeism, in collaboration with the county attorney. The policy must include interventions before 20 days of absences, which can include meetings with school officials, educational counseling and evaluations.
State senators tweaked the law this year to say policies must spell out how absences from "documented illness" will be handled, but schools are still required to include all absences when reporting.
Among those who racked up more than 20 absences last year was Mary Reynolds-East's son.
Chronic mononucleosis and strep throat cost the Millard middle-school student 15 days of the last school year.
Gastrointestinal illness, doctor and dental appointments, an ice storm and taking off the day before Thanksgiving to visit relatives put him over the 20-day mark. As required, the school reported him to the county attorney.
Doctors' notes and his lack of academic problems didn't prevent his parents from being summoned to the Douglas County Courthouse in late August.
They were among about 20 families called to a mass meeting with the county's truancy diversion team that afternoon.
Also in the group: a family struggling with cancer; two other families hit with mononucleosis; and a boy coping after the deaths of his mother, sister and uncle. Some had to take their children out of school to attend the session.
One by one over the course of two hours, the families were called to the front of the room. Reynolds-East and her husband were next to last.
Deputy Douglas County Attorney Jordan Boler told them they were called in because their son had missed more than 20 days for two years in a row. "That's a lot," she said.
Boler asked whether the couple had done something to prevent their son from getting sick again this year — a question that frustrated Reynolds-East. "There's not much we can do," she said later. "Give him vitamin C?"
In the end, Boler said the county attorney would just monitor their son's attendance and the family would not have to come back.
"I understand the goal is admirable, but there are a lot of people that could have been taken care of without coming downtown," she said. "There has to be a better way to deal with sorting through people."
Mike Horton of Omaha went through a similar hearing in the spring after debilitating headaches stemming from an immunological disorder put his high school junior over the 20-day mark. He also was told the county attorney would just monitor her attendance.
But he worries that the two of them will be under scrutiny again this year. In hopes of avoiding a repeat trip to the courthouse, he decided to take his daughter to the doctor every week to get documentation of her chronic health problems.
"It costs me a significant amount of money and the time required to transport to all the visits," Horton said.
County attorneys and judges insist they are not going after students with medical problems or family crises. That is, they said they are not generally pursuing truancy or educational neglect petitions in court in those cases.
They said the cases are often complicated, and multiple factors might be involved.
Oversight of all cases is needed, they said, to verify that students who are reported sick were actually ill and to ensure that children are not missing school for inappropriate reasons.
That oversight might mean some involvement with the legal system.
It is that position that Hall and other parents object to.
"I don't think it's right that they're taking away my right as a parent to say my child is too sick to go to school," Hall said.
Supporters of the law disagree.
"I don't think the parent is necessarily the best judge of what is a justifiable absence," said Hall County Attorney Mark Young.
The attorneys said the reporting requirement aims to make the law apply consistently statewide. Yet differences remain.
For example, the Omaha school district does not count documented medical absences toward the 20 days, said Matthew Ray, director of student and community services. Omaha Public Schools officials believe the law leaves it to school districts to decide whether to include those absences, he said.
But State Sen. Brad Ashford of Omaha, who sponsored the 2010 legislation, said he was unaware of OPS's interpretation.
He said the law doesn't give discretion to districts about reporting absences, although they can recommend that the county attorney not pursue cases of students with documented medical absences.
Ashford defended the reporting requirement and the increased legal oversight. Both are needed so absenteeism gets addressed, he said, unlike past years when school districts allowed too many students to rack up too many absences.
"I don't want to see this run amok again," Ashford said.
He acknowledged there have been problems in a few cases but said positive aspects of the law outweigh those.
Among them, he points to figures showing that the law appears to be getting more students to school.
During the 2009-10 school year, before the new law, nearly 22,000 public school students missed more than 20 days of school. That was 7.8 percent of the students in kindergarten through 12th grade.
Last year, after the law had gone into effect, the number dropped to about 18,000, or 6.3 percent of the total. Numbers declined at all grade levels, including high school, although 10 percent to 14 percent of high school students still missed 20 or more days.
Gretna Superintendent Kevin Riley said the numbers reflect the successes he is hearing about from fellow superintendents — cases in which the state's new emphasis on school attendance has helped students get to school more regularly and do better academically.
But Morgan, with the Nebraska Family Policy Forum, said intervention isn't necessary in every case. She pointed out that the state numbers don't show why students missed that many days or how well they are doing in school.
The data count everything from students undergoing cancer treatment to gang members who have all but dropped out to roam the streets.
Her own sixth-grade son accumulated several days of absences while his father was deployed overseas. Morgan let the boy stay home after he suffered a severe panic attack tied to his father's absence. She also let him miss school while his father was home on leave.
"Is it the business of the county attorney when I make a decision like this in the best interest of my child?" she asked.
State officials argue that society has an interest in making sure youngsters have the best educational start possible.
Concern about truancy heated up when Omaha metropolitan area leaders began looking at how absenteeism drags down student achievement and fosters youth crime and violence.
The absenteeism problem was highlighted in a 2009 Omaha World-Herald series on dropouts. The newspaper's analysis found that the vast majority of OPS students who missed 20 days or more in eighth grade failed to graduate from high school on time, if at all.
Statewide, high school juniors who missed more than 20 days of school scored an average of 30 points lower than students who missed fewer days, according to data collected by the Nebraska Department of Education.
"If we want to hold schools accountable, which I think we should, then we've got to get kids to school," Breed said.
Nebraska's approach makes some parents see more threat than help in the truancy efforts.
In juvenile court, the ultimate hammers are the loss of custody and termination of parental rights.
Despite assurances offered by Douglas County Juvenile Judge Elizabeth Crnkovich, several parents at the mass truancy hearing in August were angry and combative, questioning why they had been called in and challenging the truancy law.
Others were in tears. One elementary-age girl clung to her mother, who explained the girl was terrified about what might happen to her. Illnesses had put the child over the 20-day mark, the mother said.
"Do you think the law will be separated (between excused and unexcused) with time?" the mother asked.
Parents challenging the law have found an ally in State Sen. Tony Fulton of Lincoln, who is considering legislation that would limit the law's reach to unexcused absences.
He said he was troubled by the Halls' case and by similar stories from other families who have contacted his office.
"It's Orwellian. It's like (the book) '1984,'" Fulton said. "We are criminalizing good parents to get after bad parents."
Ashford said he is monitoring implementation of the law and is concerned about cases in which families may be subjected to unnecessary scrutiny.
But he and Heineman also are looking at possible legislation to tighten the law. They want to close a loophole under which students ages 16 and 17 can avoid truancy issues by dropping out of school.
Meanwhile, the state's Truancy Task Force — composed of Breed; Kerry Winterer, the CEO of the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services; and Ellen Brokofsky, the state probation administrator — recommended reducing the number of absences at which a report to the county attorney would be required.
Fulton said the issue comes down to fundamental philosophy.
"It becomes a question of what legitimately is the power of government," he said.
Contact the writer:
402-473-9583, martha.stoddard@owh.com
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