A.W.O.L

No, not me, kids. Kids from schools.

At the same time as veteran activist and career moron Sue Bradford is charging her way through parliamentary process to make smacking children a crime, our schools have decided that perhaps it's time to get hard and prosecute parents of children who play truant from school.



The BOP is reported to have the third worst rates of truancy in the country.

"Parents can be prosecuted but such cases were rare and the fines often low.

Equally, parents are often foiled by the system.

Mr Randell said his truancy officers frequently got phone calls from parents asking them to visit their house and literally pull their son or daughter out of bed....

Every year the same week was chosen in either June or July for the Ministry of Education to conduct a survey of how many students were away from school at any one time with no explanation.

Last year 6.8 per cent of secondary students were absent in the Bay, as were 2 per cent of intermediate children and just over 4 per cent of primary children."

Luckily, my kids aren't prone to truancy, but I can see how kids might, for a variety of reasons, want to stay home from school and become truant. From the teacher and pupil bullying we encountered at Tauranga Intermediate, to physical assault, threats and abuse as occurred at Tauranga Girls College, kids just don't necessarily want to be in school, let alone feel safe there.

So now Bradford is taking away our rights as parents to physically discipline our kids, should we so desire, while school principals and staff refuse to acknowledge, let alone deal with the violence their pupils face on campus. What are ordinary parents, caring parents of overwrought and unco-operative kids supposed to do? You can't smack them, Sue is making sure it's against the law (despite spending time behind bars herself not that long ago for happily breaking the law back in her shit stirring days) to smack your kid. You can't drag them physically out of bed and make them go, that's assault. You can't leave them at home, that's a crime as well.

Maybe if the schools sorted their shit out and helped kids that are disadvantaged socially, academically, financially or domestically, protected them from bullying teachers and playground violence (ok, so some are just bad bastards anyway) and helped parents deal with truant kids instead of preparing to prosecute them, things might get better.

But I doubt it, not while we have politicians who want to interfere with how ordinary, caring folks to raise their kids, but don't deal with the real crimes against kids in a timely way and let children be assaulted and die while their child welfare agency, CYFS targets the wrong people and put kids in danger in their welfare and court ordered homes (note the rampant hypocrisy in this one).

Oh, and the Government needs to change the privacy act so that schools can use video cameras to monitor their playgrounds adequately.