Source: https://www.crankytaxpayer.org/Schools/truancy_reg_iv.htm
Timestamp: 2019-04-21 12:36:18+00:00

Document:
I write to ask that you require the Virginia Board of Education to end its neglect of its duty to enforce the mandatory attendance laws.
[Requires schooling] during the period of each year the public schools are in session and for the same number of days and hours per day as the public schools . . . (emphasis supplied).
CODE § 22.1-258 requires a school division to investigate every unexcused absence and to take specified actions, culminating with a CHINS petition or complaint against the parent upon a seventh absence.
In 2010, after I had pointed out that Richmond had been and was in wholesale violation of § 22.1-258, the Board proposed a truancy regulation. Following a series of delays, the Board voted to adopt the regulation on September 27, 2012. I sued over the manifest defects in the regulation. Butcher v. Board of Education, No. CL12005348-00 (Cir. Ct. City of Richmond, Petition for Appeal, December 14, 2012).
"Truancy" means the act of accruing one or more unexcused absences.
The Board filed the reproposed regulation with the Regulatory Town Hall on January 30, 2013. The regulation has since languished at the Department of Planning and Budget and, since October 10, 2013, in the Governor’s Office .
Thus, the Board seeks to evade its duty and the manifest will of the General Assembly in order to simplify data reporting and (in the spirit of ultra vires but compassionate overreach) to avoid overloading the courts. In the latter case, the Board’s reluctance to overload the courts tells us that the Board knows that § 22.1-258 is being grossly violated. Thus, it is clear that the Board is deliberately sabotaging the statute it is required to enforce.
As reproposed, the regulation would allow a student to attend school long enough to be present at the first roll call and then to skip out for the remainder of the day. Not only is this perversion of the mandatory attendance requirement unlawful, our experience in Richmond shows it to be unwise. On January 5, 2005, Phillip Hicks stabbed Justin Creech to death near the intersection of Staples Mill Road and West Broad Street. Both Hicks and Creech were students at Thomas Jefferson High School; both had reported for school that morning and then had, as was their custom, left school. As is the custom in Richmond, the school was doing nothing to deal with Hicks’ and Creech’s truancy.
More generally, much of our juvenile crime comes from students who are truant. Yet the Board now seeks to license truancy.
Governor, I ask that you object to this regulation as authorized by CODE § 2.2-4013 and demand that the Board meet its obligation to enforce the mandatory attendance laws. If the Board then fails to promptly discharge its duty, please remove all the Board members.
 Child In Need of Services/Supervision. See CODE § 16.1-228.
 As Richmond admitted in this PowerPoint slide presented to City Council(!) last summer.

References: § 22
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