Why Truancy Laws and At-Will Employment Clash (And What It Means For Working Teens)
The fluorescent lights in the county truancy court waiting room hum so loud they make your teeth ache, and the soda vending machine by the door ate Javi’s only dollar last January when I came with him to his hearing. Javi’s 16, a junior in my English class, and his mom couldn’t get off her double shift at the nursing home to make the 9 a.m. hearing, so I filled in as his supporter for the day. He sat twisting a hole in the cuff of his thrifted hoodie, staring at the crumpled truancy citation in his lap, and finally said, “I got fired for going to my midterm. How am I the one breaking the law?”
Javi had been working 25 hours a week at the local burger chain since his dad moved across the state and stopped paying child support. The deal was he covered his own truck insurance and contributed $200 a month to rent, so his mom could keep up on utilities. His midterm for his welding pre-apprenticeship class was scheduled for a Saturday, months in advance. His boss told him he had to take the shift, that no one else could cover it. Javi picked the midterm—he’s wanted to be a welder since he was 12, fixed my broken fence for free last summer just for practice. He showed up to work Monday, and his manager handed him his final check. At-will employment means that’s totally legal. No warning, no severance, nothing.
Javi applied to a dozen places, but no one was hiring part-time for high school kids with only fast food experience that fast. His $118 insurance premium came due, and he couldn’t cover it. He let his policy lapse, so he couldn’t legally drive. His apartment is on the far west side of town, the city bus only runs once an hour, and the trip from his stop to the school takes 45 minutes. If he takes the first bus, he misses 20 minutes of first period. After three tardies, the school automatically marks an unexcused absence. After three unexcused absences in a month, you get a truancy citation. That’s how we ended up in court.
That’s when I realized how completely backwards the system is. We have truancy laws that penalize kids for not showing up to school, defaulting to the idea that every kid who misses school is just skipping to hang out at the mall. We have at-will employment that lets employers fire a kid for any reason, including choosing school over a random shift. They exist side by side, and no one talks about how they work together to trap low-income working teens. Half the juniors at my school work at least 15 hours a week, and most aren’t working for extra spending money. They’re working to help their parents pay rent, cover car insurance, buy their own clothes and school supplies, save for community college. If their boss schedules a shift during school, or fires them for prioritizing a school obligation, the end result is almost always that they can’t get to school anymore, and then they get punished for it. That’s not a kid making a bad choice. That’s two laws setting them up to fail.
After that day, I started making small changes in my classroom, and I tell other parents and teachers to do the same. First, I ask every kid on my roster to write down their regular work hours on a sticky note on the first day of school. I keep a copy in my lesson planner, and I never schedule a major test, presentation, or mandatory after-school event on a day they’re working. It takes 30 extra seconds when I’m mapping out my semester, and it eliminates half the conflicts before they start. For parents, if your teen works, send a written copy of their scheduled work hours to the school attendance office and every teacher at the start of the year. Most districts allow teachers to excuse absences or tardies for pre-documented work conflicts, but most people never think to share that information upfront.
If your kid does miss a day because of work or a work-related issue, don’t just accept the unexcused absence. Get a copy of any paperwork you have—if they got fired, a copy of the termination notice, if they had a last-minute shift change, a screenshot of the text from their boss—and bring it to the attendance office. I’ve had a dozen parents tell me they didn’t know they could challenge an unexcused absence, and getting it changed takes 10 minutes and keeps a teen from ending up with a truancy citation. If you do end up with a citation, show up to the hearing with all that paperwork. I’ve been to three of these hearings now, and every single one was dismissed once the judge saw the situation wasn’t “skipping school” it was a kid who lost their income because they went to school.
Javi’s doing okay now. He got a part-time job at a local auto shop a week after the hearing, the owner is a former welding student who went to our school, so he schedules Javi’s shifts after school and on weekends only. He’s on track to graduate next spring, and he still plans to start his apprenticeship the following fall. But I still see this play out every couple of months. Just last week, a 15 year old in my first period came in with two unexcused absences because he got fired from his grocery store job for leaving an hour early to take his little sister to her parent-teacher conference, couldn’t pay for his weekly bus pass, and missed two days of school. We got the absences excused, but it took two days of phone calls that he should never have had to make.
State legislators aren’t rushing to change either law any time soon. So all we can do is keep showing up for the kids who get stuck in the gap between two bad rules. It’s not a fix for the broken system. But it keeps a lot of kids from getting punished for something that’s never their fault.
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