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August 14, 2009
Districts sticking with current graduation requirements
School districts across Texas, including Austin, are opting to stick with their current graduation requirements for now rather than immediately embrace new, looser rules approved by the Legislature this spring.
Legislators set out in House Bill 3 to give students a little more discretion in their class schedule so they dropped some requirements for health, physical education and computer skills for students following the recommended course plan.
The changes go into effect for the 2009-10 school year, because the bill won overwhelming support in the Legislature. And the Legislature neglected to include the typical phase-in language that would apply the changes to the incoming class of high schoolers.
That sudden change is too much, district officials across the state say, so many will keep the more rigid requirements — at least for now. The districts are free to do so as long as the local requirements exceed those of the state.
“They already had students scheduled for class and already had teachers under contract,” said Debbie Graves Ratcliffe, spokeswoman for the Texas Education Agency.
Districts have, for example, hired enough teachers to provide the required health class, but the demand for that class would probably decrease if it were no longer mandated.
Other school districts — Austin among them — are concerned that the immediate change would affect academic rankings among students nearing graduation.
That was the primary reason the Austin Board of Trustees this week elected not to implement the looser graduation requirements right away.
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May 6, 2009
AG rules ankle monitors are ok to track truants
Attorney General Greg Abbott issued an opinion today telling judges that it’s fine to require ankle monitoring for truant students.
The question was posed in November by Brazos County Attorney Rodney Anderson who said a local Justice of the Peace wanted to require students charged with failure to attend school, a misdemeanor, to wear electronic monitoring devices as a sort of probation condition. Texas students are required by law to attend school.
In his letter to Abbott, Anderson conceded that the devices are typically imposed on criminal defendants who have been ordered to serve jail time. But Anderson said such monitoring has been used in three Texas court jurisdictions, including Midland County, which he described as a model in innovative truancy programs.
The devices, which send wireless signals reporting the whereabouts of the bearer every 30 seconds to every 30 minutes, are waterproof and almost indestructible. Students would be required to wear the monitors for 30 to 180 days. Constables would be able to track the current location and the history of a student’s movements.
“Electronic monitoring may also serve to deter future criminality,” Anderson said in his letter. “Tommy A. Munoz, the Brazos County Justice of the Peace who hears truancy cases, anticipates that the students who wear monitors will be more compliant in attending school.”
“The program would also encourage parents to be more involved in their child’s activities, foster communication skills and create a partnership for success between parent and child to comply with the court’s orders,” Anderson wrote.
Brazos County officials said truancy compliance rates in Midland County went from 20 percent to 95 percent once ankle monitors were used.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Texas raised privacy rights concerns over a similar program in Dallas County, and state Sen. Royce West, D-Dallas, has said that ankle bracelets criminalize students unnecessarily.
In his opinion, Abbott said judges may require truants to wear ankle bracelets “if the justice court determines that the use of the device in a given proceeding is reasonable,” a determination that judges must make on a case-by-case basis.
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