Daytime Curfew Sought to Curb Truancy

Police chiefs and school officials announced Wednesday that they will push for a countywide daytime curfew ordinance to curb truancy.

The measure will be drafted by a coalition made up of the county’s Chiefs of Police and Sheriff’s Assn., other law enforcement agencies and 28 school superintendents. It has not been decided what penalties the ordinance would entail or how it would be enforced.

The ordinance would target the county’s 460,000 students age 5 to 17. Any school-age child on the streets between 8 a.m. and 2:30 p.m. on weekdays would be apprehended, said Irvine Police Chief Charles Brobeck, flanked by dozens of police chiefs and school superintendents at a news conference.

Officials will seek to address the potential difficulty in enforcing the ordinance: Large numbers of students are legitimately out of school on any given day because of year-round school schedules.

The measure will be drafted in coming weeks with the hope that the county’s 31 cities will have adopted it by September, when classes resume at most schools. The initiative would not be effective unless enacted by all the cities, Brobeck said.

“We will not achieve success if not all of the county adopts it,” he said, “because the youngsters who are not attending schools will know where they can go” to avoid being cited.

No city in the county has a daytime curfew, but a number of them have night curfews to reduce loitering. Police and school officials said curbing truancy would help reduce youth crime.

“Failure to go to school is really the formula for a kid to become a repeat offender,” Chief Probation Officer Michael Schumacher said.

Schumacher said that 12,000 youths were referred to the Probation Department last year by school officials and social service workers. That number was a 14% increase from the previous year.

No single agency tracks countywide truancy rates. But officials in several cities and school districts said they sense that the problem is serious.

Huntington Beach Police Chief Ronald E. Lowenberg said that 27% of the city’s residential burglaries are committed during the day by school-age children. He added that the rate of juvenile arrests rose by 35% in the last year.