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in high school, were you ever late to class and just brushed it under the rug
because, "tardies don't count"? Interesting enough, tardies do count
and they add up into absences and you get charged with truancy. In the article
Texas Turns Away From Prosecuting Truants by Claudio Sanchez he
explains that truancy has been around for too long-20 years! Governor Greg
Abbott signed a law that no longer lets truancy be treated as a Class C
Misdemeanor. With this new law being passed it is a lot of relief for the
students who have busy lives and cannot always make it to school on time, if at
all. The amount of student who were being charged with truancy and were not
trouble makers was outrageous and has since gone down. The real question and
problem is how do we keep students in school who aren’t busy with more
important things in school? And how do we differentiate between the ones that
are missing school because of family emergencies and the ones who are skipping
school because they have nothing better to do?
