In collaboration with the Center for Public Integrity's iWatch News, KQED Public Radio’s California Report has taken a look at the debate over a daytime curfew law before the Los Angeles City Council today, Wednesday, Feb. 22. 

Our reports include interviews with participants in a movement opposing curfew enforcement that has resulted in mostly low-income and black and Latino students receiving $250-plus tickets in Los Angeles.  Ironically, kids who were ticketed for arriving just minutes late to school — sometimes because their city buses were late — have had to miss more school to answer to accusations in court.  

Santa Monica-based KCRW public radio host Warren Olney also took an interest in the daytime curfew along with KQED, which is based in San Francisco. Olney interviewed me about the daytime curfew controversy on Feb. 14 on his “Which Way, L.A.?” show.  

Los Angeles City Council members are considering adopting proposed reforms that would limit when and how police can ticket kids, and drastically lower — if not eliminate — monetary fines in favor of mandatory counseling.

Would you pay $5 as a penalty for your kid neglecting to have shoelaces tied at school?

Chicago is buzzing over a controversial practice aimed at forcing inner-city school kids to follow rules. The Noble Network of Charter Schools, which has received high praise from Mayor Rahm Emanuel, is charging its mostly low-income students five bucks for violating certain rules, which reportedly include bringing “flaming hot” potato chips to school, chewing gum and falling asleep in class.

A group of parents whose kids attend Noble’s 10 Chicago charter high schools rose up this month to publicly object to the practice, which they are denouncing as both overkill and a cynical way for the company to collect extra money, according to reports in the Chicago Tribune and other media outlets.

Some parents also allege the practice is used to push out kids the schools would rather not have. The Tribune has a chart showing the charter’s graduation rates but also its high rate of non-returning students.

At news conferences, parents and a group called Parents United for Responsible Education said they obtained documents showing that Noble has collected almost $400,000 in fines from families since the 2008-2009 academic year. Noble calls the charges “fees,” not fines. Last year, the charter company raked in almost $190,000 in fines for infractions and $140 fees for summer behavior classes some repeat offenders are required to take.

Try accused kids as adults?

That’s what some are calling for in response to news that three black Florida teens have been charged with beating up an autistic white classmate at a bus stop.

While two of the accused assailants in Brevard County allegedly slapped, kicked and called the 13-year-old autistic boy a “cracker,” another filmed the attack and cheered,  according to police, the autistic boy’s mother and others quoted in a report by Orlando’s WESH.com.  Photos and names of the accused attackers are posted on some media websites and were broadcast, while other outlets chose not to disclose them.   

The Florida Today website says the three have been charged with aggravated stalking with a hate crime enhancement.  One of the accused is identified as 15 and two are 16. The teens were reportedly attending an alternative school where students facing expulsion or other problems are sent.

Comments on the Florida Today website show some readers took pleasure in the fact that African American teens were charged with a hate crime. And some of the comments demonstrate how public sentiment has helped push nearly every state in the nation into making it easier to try minors as adults. 

In Florida, the state attorney will decide whether that’s what these three teens will face after they initially go to juvenile court.

In a policy debate watched nationally, the city of Los Angeles came closer Monday to getting rid of most — but not all — controversial monetary fines for students who are tardy or truant from school.

For several years, students in Los Angeles have complained about hefty $250-plus fines for being tardy, and about police officers who staked out schools to catch students sometimes only minutes late. The ticketing also requires students to go to court, with parents, during school hours, so they miss more class time and parents miss work.

On Monday, the Los Angeles City Council’s Public Safety Committee voted to set limits on how police enforce the city’s 1995 daytime curfew law and to stop imposing the $250 fines, which, once fees and court costs are added on, can rise to $400 or more for one violation.  

The curfew amendments — if they get full city council approval on Feb. 22 — would replace the $250 fines with graduated penalties emphasizing counseling. Students ticketed once or twice would be required to participate in an attendance-improvement plan or in counseling or community service. If ticketed a third time, the ordinance would call for a possible monetary fine whose amount is still being negotiated, said Michael de la Rocha, legislative deputy to Los Angeles City Council member Tony Cardenas, who sponsored the amendments.

Cardenas wanted to end all fines, and would prefer capping a third-strike fine at $20, which in reality would end up costing students more, given extra fees that get tacked on, de la Rocha said.

Shrewsbury teen Valerie N. Hall pushed her mother down a flight of stairs in 2000, smashed her head in with a hammer and left Kathleen Thompsen Hall to die while she went for a ride with her boyfriend. For her mother's murder, Hall, a depressed and suicidal 16-year-old at the time, served nine years in prison. 

Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School student John Odgren, who suffers from depression and other mental ailments, fatally stabbed schoolmate James Alenson in the boy's bathroom in 2007 when he was 16, and after realizing what he had done, tried to get help. Odgren is serving life without the possibility of parole at Bridgewater State Hospital. 

Both crimes were ghastly. Both teens suffered from mental illness. Both were charged with first-degree murder. 

But their punishments could not have been more different. 

The dispositions of the Hall and Odgren cases illustrate the profound inequities that have grown up in the Massachusetts juvenile justice system since the passage of a tough sentencing law enacted 15 years ago and designed to punish the most depraved “super-predators” among teen killers. 

An investigation by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting reveals, for the first time, that that law is not being applied consistently to the most horrific juvenile murder cases, as it was intended. The findings come as the U.S. Supreme Court prepares this spring to tackle whether it is “cruel and unusual” punishment to sentence juveniles 14 and under to life without parole for murder. 

New data analysis by investigative reporters in Florida shows a huge jump in children’s poverty in a state hard hit by foreclosures and unemployment.  

According to our colleagues at the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting, “homelessness among school-age children soared from 30,878 in the 2006-07 school year to 56,680 in 2010-11. Homelessness for children of all ages, including those too young for public school, was 83,957 in 2010-11, up from 49,886 in 2006-07.”

The math is pretty stark: Between 2007 and 2011, the number of homeless school-age kids in Florida leaped 84 percent. 

The Center's thoughtful story on the impact of the Great Recession charts the rise of children’s poverty, county by county in Florida. Ellen L. Bassuk, president of the National Center on Family Homelessness, based in Massachusetts, is quoted making a disturbing observation.

“I think that we are growing a Third World in our own back yard,” Bassuk says. “We look at developing countries, but we don’t look at our own country."

It’s made national headlines, and now the sordid story of alleged lewd and bizarre conduct by a Los Angeles teacher includes another sensitive dimension: immigration status.

A number of parents of students at Miramonte Elementary School are apparently admitting they are undocumented immigrants and fear coming forward to talk with law enforcement about allegations against teacher Mark Berndt. Most students are Latino at the school where the suspect has taught for more than 30 years. And many parents are immigrants, some legal residents, some not.   

Los Angeles’ La Opinion, one of the nation’s largest Spanish-language newspapers, has a piece today quoting undocumented parents who say they have information to share about Berndt but are afraid they could be deported if they speak to investigators. 

One of the parents has a daughter who received a post card from the accused teacher, and words of encouragement from him about how smart she was. He wrote “college girl” on a photo he gave her that the family has kept, La Opinion reports.  The paper says eight families have retained a lawyer and have information about Berndt, who is accused of 23 counts of lewd behavior toward students.  He remains in jail and has not entered a plea in court.

LOS ANGELES — Fifteen-year-old Juan Carlos Amezcua was just five minutes late for school, and already at the corner by Theodore Roosevelt High School in Los Angeles when a school police cruiser’s siren went off last Nov. 16.

The consequences of what happened next — handcuffing, allegations of rough treatment and a $250 daytime curfew ticket — are still resonating here. In January, Amezcua and his cousin, who was also stopped by police en route to school, saw their tickets dismissed in juvenile court. Still upset at their encounter with police, though, the pair and their parents filed a complaint on Feb. 3 with the school district and police concerning officers’ behavior.

Meanwhile, the presiding judge of Los Angeles’ juvenile court and Los Angeles city leaders are also moving to curtail law-enforcement involvement in policing student attendance.

The dispute is indicative of a broader, complex and, at times, racially charged debate over how best to deal with tardy or truant students in jurisdictions across the country. Since the 1990s, cities large and small have adopted daytime curfews with monetary fines to force kids to get to school. Now the City of Angels is at ground zero as the impact of such ordinances is reconsidered.

Next Monday, the Los Angeles City Council’s Public Safety Committee starts a review of proposed amendments to that city’s nine-year-old daytime curfew law. Among the proposals: setting limits on enforcement by police, who routinely search youths and sometimes handcuff them. The proposed amendments would also effectively end $250 fines in favor of negotiated agreements that tardy students submit to counseling.

Players in the fight to shut down — or keep open — the last of California’s state-run youth prisons are meeting this week where the action is: Gov. Jerry Brown’s Department of Finance, where the nitty-gritty of state budgeting gets done.

Struggling with the costs of incarceration generally, California could become the first state to wipe out is state juvenile jail division and the last of three prisons in a highly discredited system. 

Sources said “stakeholders” on both sides of the proposal were invited to a meeting today, Thursday, to discuss Brown’s proposal to phase out three prisons housing about 1,100 wards at more than $200,000 a year each.

On one side, pushing for closure, are many, but not all, juvenile-justice reform advocates who have long attacked the state system as a scandal-prone failure.  

On the other side: influential groups such as the Chief Probation Officers of California and the California District Attorneys Association. They argue that not all California counties are ready to take these higher-level offenders despite prior funding shifted to counties — and offers of more — to increase their ability to do that.

The California Correctional Peace Officers Association, the prison guards’ union, is also against total closure. It represents one of the nation’s largest law-enforcement employee groups. Last year, legislators in California voted to require that counties pay the state $125,000 per ward, starting now, if revenues to the state didn’t improve. They didn’t, but collection is on hold — for now.