Lincoln, IL City Council Wants Truancy Ordinance

An organized faction of parents who home-school their children opposes the proposal as written. Their main argument at a city council meeting this week was essentially this: The law should target only students who previously have been identified as truants. What they really meant to say (but did a feeble job of doing so) was this: We fear this proposal amounts to a daytime curfew on school-age youths, a curfew that opens the door to police harassment of our home-schooled children.

Despite the lack of state-wide homeschool advocacy against daytime curfews in Illinois, the Lincoln homeschool community has confronted this infringement on their daily freedoms. In reading the letters to the editor that were written and with support from the L-C editorial linked above, Lincoln homeschoolers might be hopeful that logic will reign and the ordinance will be dropped.

Lincoln schools have a problem with truancy. What is the cause of the problem with kids not wanting to be in the classroom? The schools’ job is to educate the enrolled kids and figure out how to engage them in that learning process. The Lincoln school systems should deal with their truancy problem without taking away freedoms from others in the community.

This Lincoln issue has been noted here before along with an archive of daytime curfew issues across the country: