If you've been homeschooling for a good amount of time, you may have heard of daytime curfew laws. It's one of the ideas being implemented by public education professionals to combat growing truancy rates in schools. Several cities in our nation have put daytime curfews into effect. The troubling part is that more truant officers in other cities are envisioning their own daytime curfews.

An article in the Waco Tribune from this weekend is one evidence of this. Here's an excerpt:


Consider the following scenario. Your 14 year-old child is returning from the library on her bike when a police cruiser rolls up on her suddenly. The officer emerges from the vehicle, asking to see her ID. When she shows him her library card as her only identification she's carrying, the officer detains her, despite her protests that she's homeschooled, until it's determined that she is telling the truth. By then, she's been handcuffed "for her own safety" and placed in the back of the cruiser, possibly taken downtown. Oh, and you don't hear a thing about it until she gets home, far later than planned and causing you more than a little concern. This scenario is fiction, but sadly, these stories documented by the HSLDA are not.

Harrassment of homeschoolers by truant officers and student attendance review boards is not new, but daytime curfew laws are made usually without any regard to homeschooling families and become a new tool to be abused by truant officers.

The following points were put together by my friend Scott Somerville when he worked for HSLDA. Scott has recently launched the K-Dad Network. Here's an abbreviated version of his summation about daytime curfews:

• Daytime curfews violate a minor's fundamental constitutional right to freedom of movement as guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment on the public streets, highways and areas of the city without being subjected to prior governmental restraint.  
• Daytime curfews violate the fundamental legal principle of the presumption of innocence. This presumption is protected by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth and Fifth Amendments to the United States Constitution. 
  
• Daytime curfews are, in essence, beefed-up truancy ordinances. All states have already addressed the area of truancy in a comprehensive way. There is no need for new laws addressing the issue of truancy. The present laws addressing minors simply need to be enforced.

(Perhaps this point is the most troubling...)

• Daytime curfews dangerously train young citizens to accept, as normal, constraints that are inconsistent with the freedom they should be educated to enjoy and use responsibly in their adult years.
  

We have every reason to oppose the election of city and state officials who will be willing to impose this unconstitutional and very dangerous breach of our freedom, yet few are really making waves about it. Do we really want to fight city councils and sue for our children's right to walk outdoors?

Take a few minutes between now and November 7th to look up your candidates and see who has been contributing to their campaigns and who is endorsing them. If they're endorsed by the NEA or your state's education association, how willing will they be to listen to them when a group like that wants to "decrease the dropout rate" by passing a daytime curfew?

I believe in this so much that I will, time permitting, look up any candidate, research them and let you know what I find. All you have to do is to comment in and give me is the name of the candidate and the seat they are running for (including city and state).

Whatever you do, go vote! Give your kids a chance to see democracy in action!

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