By Count Friedrich von Olsen
I think I have this straight, but if I don’t, I will publicly apologize to the Attorney General and buy her and her husband and their children a steak dinner at the most expensive restaurant in California…
Yesterday, that is Thursday February 12, California Attorney General Kamala Harris wrote a letter to elected and appointed leaders in all 58 of the state’s counties who have responsibility for child welfare and juvenile justice systems to inform them of the creation of the Bureau of Children’s Justice at the California Department of Justice. In that letter, she stated, “The Bureau’s mission is to protect the rights of children and focus the attention and resources of law enforcement and policymakers on the importance of safeguarding every child so that they can meet their full potential.” So far, so good…
The letter lays out a series of things the bureau will look into and oversee, shepherd and prosecute both criminally and civilly, all pertaining to the welfare of children. Most of them sound like good ideas to me, although I cannot help suspecting that this initiative has something to do with Ms. Harris’s current effort to capture the soon-to-be vacant seat of Senator Barbara Boxer…
As I said, I commend the attorney general and her office for taking this issue, in its general sense, seriously. But buried in the letter is some language that I think, in a specific sense, is not quite appropriate from a governmental official, an elected official in Sacramento and a politician who is, simply, the highest law enforcement authority in the state…
Under that portion of the letter devoted to educational rights, Ms. Harris propounds that children have the right to “attend school and participate in extracurricular, cultural, and personal enrichment activities, consistent with their age and developmental level, with minimal disruptions to school attendance and educational stability;” to “access the same academic resources, services, and enrichment activities as other students;” to “remain enrolled in and attend their school of origin pending resolution of any school placement dispute, and be protected from being penalized for school absences due to placement changes, court appearances, or related court ordered activities.” There was some intimation in news reports following the release of the letter that the attorney general’s office would “crack down” on school districts that have a demonstrated pattern of too stringently enforcing school or school district placement rules…
That is what I find troubling. School district and school attendance boundaries exist for good and practical reasons. There are rules and boundaries in place to ensure that one particular school or school district is not overwhelmed by the number of students it must accommodate and educate. Those rules also ensure that some schools or districts, in which taxpayers have heavily invested, are not underattended, thus leading to the squandering of taxpayer money and public resources…
By threatening to take action against school districts that enforce the regulations and rules of law to maintain boundary and jurisdictional integrity so that all of the students they are legally mandated to serve can achieve a quality education free of classroom overcrowding is, in my view, beneath the standard we in California want to see in the individual we have collectively elected to uphold the law…