The Community Rights Campaign is a feature in the new issue of Colorlines. Specifically, the article features our campaign on the Los Angeles Unified School District to end "pre-prison" conditions in LAUSD schools, such as by placing a moratorium on giving tickets for tardiness and truancy.

Re-posted below from COLORLINES article: Young, Brown—And Charged With Truancy

Issue #52, Sept/Oct 2009

Young, Brown—And Charged With Truancy

By Julianne Ong Hing

September 2, 2009

In the three years that Erick Fuentes-Casas has been in high school, he’s gotten three truancy tickets for being out on the streets during school hours.

The first time, Fuentes-Casas didn’t think too much of it. He was a ninth grader at Cleveland High School in Southern California’s San Fernando Valley. It was the beginning of the school year, those early days when homework is light and everyone is settling into their schedules. He was walking with friends one morning, late for class, but, “we were on the same block as Cleveland on our way to school,” recalled Fuentes-Casas, who is beginning his senior year. “The cop pulled us over, asked for our IDs, and he said, ‘You guys [are] getting a ticket for being late.’”

Truancy tickets don’t come cheap. They cost $250 dollars each.

The second one, which Fuentes-Casas got during his sophomore year, cost $570 because he was stopped by an officer with the Los Angeles Police Department around the corner from an alley where some graffiti had recently gone up. Although Fuentes-Casas, who’s on the track and field team, had a race off campus that day and a school pass that allowed him to be out of classes early, he still got a ticket.

Both times, Fuentes-Casas’s brother accompanied him to court and got the tickets dismissed. “By then, I was fed up with the police,” Fuentes-Casas explained. “Ever since then, I keep my distance from school police because I don’t trust them.”

But a few months later, he got his third ticket.

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