If They’re on Campus, They’re Not Truants

It’s 6:38 a.m. and I’m stuck behind a gravel truck on a stretch of Joshua tree-lined highway, fretting that my irresponsibility (today’s theme) will push 15-year-old Annie Kate further down the path to an orange jumpsuit stamped “County Jail.”

At 6:43 I pull through a chain-link fence surrounding a Pinon Hills home. Excuses roil my mind. Annie’s mom, Debbie McAfee, had told me to be there by 6:30. The last thing she wants is another visit from the school cops.

Now Elmo, a brown terrier mix with a penchant for bolting at inopportune moments, is going crazy and Debbie has one hand on his collar and one on the screen door and she’s calling out to Annie, who as usual has been up since 5:30 and has already made herself waffles and now comes out of the bathroom adjusting her precisely layered shirts and smoothing her freshly straightened hair and grabs her lunch and stuffs papers into her backpack and squeezes past her dog and steps quickly across the gravel driveway and into Debbie’s red Tacoma pickup and we all shudder off down the corrugated dirt road in a cloud of high desert dust as the dashboard clock tick-tick-ticks.

I knew I had to come to the Victor Valley after being drawn into a fiery debate at a Los Angeles birthday party.

It seems that back in February, on a morning not unlike the one I had just seen, Annie arrived at her first-period biology class a few minutes late. Following Serrano High’s rules, the teacher locked Annie out. As Annie and other stragglers lined up for passes, school police officers, armed with the local district’s tough new anti-tardy policy, handed them truancy citations.

Over the next few days, dozens of busy parents and their slow-moving offspring were told to appear in court and face fines as high as $250.

When the day came, Debbie told the judge pro tem that the citation wrongly accused her daughter of truancy because she had been standing in a line on campus at the time. He told Annie to pay $57 and do 20 hours of community service. Annie and Debbie decided to fight.

Most of us at the party had known Annie Kate since she was born. We listened to her gentle voice, observed her sweet smile, and saw a bright young woman, a budding artist, not a juvenile scofflaw.

Still, against my better judgment, I had to ask: “Shouldn’t a school do whatever it takes to make sure students are on time?”

Teenagers’ jaws dropped. The gathered parents sputtered.

To understand the intensity of their sympathy for Debbie and rage against the public education machine (and me), you have to understand how Debbie and daughter landed on a stretch of stunning-desert-turned-sketchy-human-habitat midway between Victorville and Palmdale.

Well into her elementary school years, you see, Annie and her big sister Libby had lived with their mother and father in a large house with a fine view. Debbie and spouse were successful film editors, and they built their flexible schedules around the girls, who attended our great little boutique public elementary school.

Then the father split. The divorce got ugly. Film editing went digital and demand for Debbie’s negative-cutting skills waned.

As her income shrank, Debbie and the girls hop-scotched from a Brentwood apartment to a cottage in Palms and finally to her parents’ Woodland Hills home. At each step down the economic ladder, Debbie put her daughters’ education first, finding the best public schools and fighting to get them in. When it became apparent that the BMW-driving kids on one Westside campus also had a taste for expensive drugs, she tried home-schooling.

Not long after she started working at Home Depot, Debbie realized it was time to get out of expensive L.A. Carrying a freshly minted real estate license and a printout of high school test scores, she found a rental house on a small plot of chaparral and enrolled Annie in burgeoning Serrano, in Phelan. (Libby, who is attending community college, stays with her grandparents.)

So it is that on the morning of my visit we race down a dirt road, across Highway 138 and back onto dirt. Terrified quail dart into the tumbleweeds. Kidneys thud. We pull up across from the school at 6:54 and Annie falls into step with the throng of students pouring through the gates, just ahead of the 7 o’clock bell.

In the attendance office, I encounter a mom whose daughter had been a minute late.

“It’s absurd,” Victoria Churgin says of the school’s tardiness crackdown. “I’ve been here 13 years. The traffic is crazy now. What was a 10-minute drive to school now takes 25.”

Outside, Debbie has corralled Terralyn Hamlin, a mom whose daughter was also cited for truancy in February, while standing in the tardy line after showing up “like 30 seconds” late for class.

Hamlin and her husband paid a lawyer $1,500 and fought the citation “on principle.” On April 27, the court dismissed the citation for truancy, which San Bernardino County Ordinance 25.022a defines as “to loiter, idle, wander, stroll or play” in a public place. Still, annoyed, the Hamlins plan to file a lawsuit against the district.

If the threat of parental uprising has Serrano’s dean worried, it doesn’t show.

“In one two-week period, before the new policy, we had 1,387 tardies in one day,” Mike Tropila says. “Teachers were having to restart their classes over and over as students came in.”

Now tardies are down to seven to 15 in the course of a day.

Paul Miller, chief of the school district police, has no problem playing bad cop.

“Parents,” he says, “need to stop making excuses for their kids.”

I think of this back at Debbie’s house, where the refrigerator and mirrors are posted with motivational sayings and, although it is now May, Christmas cards cover the front door.

There’s a sewing machine on one living room table and another holds the computer Debbie uses to research real estate listings and track down paid recruits for a company that runs focus groups -- her second job.

Film-editing equipment has taken over the laundry room, but that’s now a third career.

“Artist” isn’t even on the list at the moment. Debbie’s paintings and intricate quilts hang as vestiges of a time when life was less defined by obligations.

Seriously as mother and daughter took that citation, Annie has arrived late to school three times since then. Their reasons: adolescent bad-hair-day conniptions (“My hair! My hair! My hair!”) and single mom work deadlines (“Just one more minute, please!”). Neither fit the district’s definition of “valid excuse.”

That last tardy brought a school police officer to Debbie’s gate, just to let her know that Serrano takes attendance seriously.

“I felt defeated,” Debbie says.

Then my usually upbeat friend heaves a sigh that sucks the hypocritical self-righteousness out of me.

“I’m doing the best I can do,” she says. “My life is hard. I don’t think its OK for Annie to be late for school, but sometimes it happens. I don’t have someone to help get her to school. It’s just life, you know, and it’s hard.”

On Thursday, Annie and Debbie went to court again. They arrived 20 minutes early. The school’s representative was ... tardy.

The judge dismissed the case.

The district, meanwhile, has tweaked its policy so that the penalties get progressively tougher, with the citation coming only after the fifth tardy.

Good decisions. But that “truancy” bit is just wrong.

When Annie Kate was standing in that tardy line, she was on campus. She wasn’t truant by any reasonable definition. That will be true if she’s tardy a 25th or 42nd time. It will be true regardless of how far district lawyers think they can stretch the letter of the law.

That doesn’t mean, however, that the school shouldn’t come down hard on adorable Annie for her repeat offenses against the tardiness code.

A school’s main responsibility is to teach. And though it’s counterintuitive to lock kids out of classes they clearly don’t consider all that important anyway, schools have to draw tough lines. They can’t wimp out every time a parent thinks his or her darling is the exception to a rule -- whether that parent is a meth-freak loser, high-achieving know-it-all or nobly struggling single mom.

To discuss this column or debate the question, “Are tough tardy penalties wise or cruel?” visit latimes.com/schoolme.