As our Scott Reeder reported in April, the Sangamon County State’s Attorney’s Office and the state Regional Office of Education are working together on what Reeder described as “a tougher, more coordinated approach to chronic truancy” (“Tackling chronic absenteeism,” April 23).
In Illinois, school attendance is compulsory and parents as guardians are responsible for getting their children to school. Some parents don’t know they are responsible, others don’t care, some resent the state meddling in family affairs. Some know and care but can’t control their kids, especially the older ones. The law draws no distinctions; parents who fail to deliver their kids to our temples of learning are vulnerable to fines and even jail time. And because abetting truancy can be construed as child neglect, parents can even lose their kids.
The truancy law has seldom been enforced to the letter, partly because lots of grownups see skipping school as just kids goofing off. Many parents sanction it with a wink; one of this country’s most beloved folk heroes, after all, is that charming Illinois truant Ferris Bueller. But not all our school-skippers are Ferris Buellers. Today roughly one-fifth of school-age kids, most of them kids who can least afford to miss school, are not regular schoolgoers. This is not goofing off, this is screwing up.
State’s Attorney John Milhiser justified the renewed resort to the punitive powers of the state to compel school attendance out of concern for the kids. “We know they’re better off if they’re in school,” he told IT.
This has been official dogma in Illinois since 1883 when the General Assembly passed the first compulsory school attendance law. That was an era in which many kids under 16 were slaving away in sweatshops or worse. These days it’s the idle child that is the worry, since kids not in school (disaffected or disengaged boys in particular) often will be somewhere else making nuisances of themselves.
The Sangamon County initiative notes that kids who go to school are less likely to commit crimes as they get older. I’m not sure that schools deserve the credit for this; it seems possible that kids who are happy in school are less likely to cause trouble to begin with. Unable and uninterested kids, however, often feel they are being imprisoned without committing a crime, that school is a form of incarceration with parents dragooned by the state as guards.
That troubled reformer, Jane Addams, supported laws compelling school attendance because they kept Illinois kids out of the sweatshops but warned that schools should not be a substitute for jails. If you’re going to force kids into schools, she wrote, better make the schools genuinely educational and socially responsive.
Sure. Why not? Now as in Addams’ day, lots of kids skip school because they are chronically sick or have learning problems or don’t get enough sleep or food or because their families move around a lot. Regional Superintendent Shannon Fehrholz emphasized that authorities need not only to threaten parents but help them get help from social service agencies, including the schools.
Unfortunately, if you turn a school into a social service agency, you usually get a poor version of each. (At least you do in this country; interestingly, nations that do not face an absenteeism crisis usually have better social service systems than we do, not just better schools.) Making absenteeism a matter for the courts is no solution, either, if the courts are strapped for resources.
Milhiser lamented that the new initiative is mostly a symbolic, signal-sending exercise, because his office lacks the resources to actually enforce the law. But delinquent parents are not people alert to signals of a subtler kind; as a local judge also conceded, many parents have ignored multiple official notices about their malfeasance under the law. It is no easier to make an adult a good parent against her will than it is to make a kid a good student against his will.
Looked at through the lens of county government, the new initiative is sensible and proactive. Looked at from outside government, the picture is fuzzier. Is it wise to turn people into criminals for being poor parents, in many cases parents who had the same defeating experience with schools when they were young? Indeed, is it bad parenting to refuse to bully or browbeat or bribe a kid to go to a school where the child is frustrated, bored and embarrassed?
Milhiser and Fehrholz are concerned public servants, and I sympathize with them. School attendance is one of those things about which “something must be done” and punishing indifferent parents is something. It might not be the wisest thing and it certainly is not a proven good thing, but it’s something.
James Krohe has written some two dozen pieces about Springfield schools, going back to 1978. He took up absenteeism in “Trusting to miracles,” Sept. 9, 2010.
This article appears in November 5-11, 2026.
