Texas truant students to be tracked by GPS anklets

[babylonsister]

Texas truant students to be tracked by GPS anklets

By ELIZABETH WHITE – 1 day ago


SAN ANTONIO, Texas (AP) — Court authorities here will be able to track students with a history of skipping school under a new program requiring them to wear ankle bracelets with Global Positioning System monitoring.

But at least one group is worried the ankle bracelets will infringe on students' privacy.

Linda Penn, a Bexar County justice of the peace, said she anticipates that about 50 students from four San Antonio-area school districts — likely to be mostly high schoolers — will wear the anklets during the six-month pilot program announced Friday. She said the time the students wear the anklets will be decided on a case-by-case basis.

"We are at a critical point in our time where we can either educate or incarcerate," Penn said, linking truancy with juvenile delinquency and later criminal activity. "We can teach them now or run the risk of possible incarceration later on in life. I don't want to see the latter."

Penn said students in the program will wear the ankle bracelets full-time and will not be able to remove them. They'll be selected as they come through her court, and Penn will target truant students with gang affiliations, those with a history of running away and skipping school and those who have been through her court multiple times.

more...

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5jFYM06p0hvA97H1VyrK6x4G6dzqQD92NRQ4O0

[snappyturtle]

1. Won't work. n/t

[Turbineguy]

2. That's just crazy

Here's an idea: :think: How about figuring out why they don't want to go to school and looking at that?

[riverdeep]

6. It's putting a band-aid on the problem,

but a band-aid is better than nothing. Finding out and then correcting why these kids are skipping school is likely an intensive procedure.

[madeline_con]

8. Sure! Let's do ANOTHER study on what we already know.

We can't fix a lot of home lives without begining one day one when a kid is born. But, they remain the root cuaseof the problem. That and learning disabilities.

Meanwhile, preventing crime by idle kids wandering the streets during school (work) hours is not a bad idea.

[marmar]

3. WTF? It's like we're living through a really bad B-movie.....

:wtf:

[babylonsister]

4. I know. Police state for minor infractions? This isn't the world I grew up in. nt

[madeline_con]

7. Do you know how criminals begin their careers? n/t

[babylonsister]

9. By skipping classes? I do remember doing that, though not

consistently, and I'm no criminal.

So you think this idea is A-OK?

[madeline_con]

10. Key words: "though not consistently". The OP isn't about that.

We've all done that.

This is about habitually truant students. Laying out of school can not come to any good for these kids.

[babylonsister]

12. Do you think those ankle bracelets will deter them? It might be impetus

for them to quit school altogether. I don't know what the answer is, but treating them like criminals doesn't seem to me to be the way to encourage them to attend school.

[madeline_con]

15. Isn't truancy a crime? n/t

[LeftyMom]

13. I was "habitually truant" and nothing bad became of me.

I was bored at school, even with honors/AP classes and being two years ahead of my age group, so on days where nothing interesting was going on I didn't go.

I didn't need an ankle bracelet, I needed somebody to tell me I could have tested out of high school early and gone on to college instead of wasting my time with stuff I'd learned years before on my own.

[madeline_con]

14. You were not who this is for. n/t

[TexasObserver]

5. day time burglaries = teens who either quit school or laying out

Many, many daytime burglaries are pulled by kids who break into the houses in their own neighborhoods, kids who have either quit school, been kicked out of school, on suspension, or just ditching.

I'm not crazy about GPS anklets, but for kids with proven records as thieves, it is one way to avoid incarcerating them.

[BlooInBloo]

11. Heh. Electronic parents.