RCI: It’s a normal Wednesday in Jersey City municipal court as the names of 26 truants are read before Judge Cynthia Jackson. Nearly half the cases are no-shows. “Warrant” is repeated over and over. But once a week, a long line of teens — each with over a dozen unexcused absences — are brought before the judge to face fines and explain their reasons for missing class.
There’s the 15-year-old girl whose family is from Honduras who hasn’t been to school yet this year. And the Pakistani teen who says he falls asleep in class because he’s bored and doesn’t hear the teacher call roll.
Fifteen-year-old Joseph, whose mother is from Antigua and is standing beside him, has been skipping class and falling in with the wrong crowd. In June he was jumped at school as part of a gang initiation, which left him with a black eye and bruises. Joseph’s father was deported back to Saint Vincent and his older brother was arrested in connection with a shooting. So Joseph not showing up for class is the least of this family’s problems.
Judge Jackson gives Joseph some paper and sends him to another room to write about where he sees himself in five years. Janice, his mom, sits anxiously at the back of the court. “I have to go to work,” says Janice, a housekeeper. “I’m already late.” Twenty minutes later, Joseph emerges with his essay. It says his dream is to become a boxer.
The judge is exasperated. “You can be anything you want to be but you’re making bad choices,” she says. “At the end of the day, I can’t want more for you than you want for yourself.”
It’s the usual lecture from this judge and hundreds of judges across the country as the children of immigrant families – some documented and others not – are dragged into court for chronic absence. The reasons are as varied as the places they come from. Some are from countries where a teenager doesn’t normally attend school. Some are caught up in gang activity or fear falling prey to it at school. Some families – particularly in cities where police are working with immigration authorities – skip school when Immigration and Customs Enforcement is snooping around, or don’t even enroll their teenagers for fear they will be found out and sent back to where they came from.
But in many cases teenagers are simply teenagers behaving badly.
“These parents come here for a better life, but sometimes the kids don’t give a shit,” said David Ishibashi, executive director of the Youth Success Network, which works with chronically absent children in New Jersey. “These people risk their lives to come here.” But in many cases, he added, the problems immigrant teens face – poverty, trauma, illness and underperforming schools — run much deeper than a bad attitude.
Illegal immigrants, border wall, oh my! It’s pathetic the way you people are so easily distracted. You are being played like a fiddle. How stupid can you be? This border business is just a distraction to take our eyes off of what we should really be focusing on. You could send every Beaner back to Mexico and build a mile high wall around the entire country and put a roof over it, too, and it wouldn’t make a freaking bit of difference. You’d still have the FBI, the FISA Court, the DOJ, the Federal Courts, and BOTH political parties with their collective panties in a twist because Hillary isn’t president. They have pulled SH*T that should scare the pants off of every American citizen. The jails should be full of former Federal Employees for the crap they’ve pulled, but we are being force fed sob story after sob story about immigrants on the loose and Federal paychecks that are late. Get a clue, people.
Education theater. Just like TSA Security theater. Both useless taxpayer funded farces and major annoyances.
What is the point?
As our country unravels into abject insanity…
I guess my “Leave it To Beaver” and “Andy Mayberry”
upbringing is long gone ??? Sad too.
Congress is largely full or traitors and low grade morons, their frequent breaks are a cover ups for mental health treatment and medications.
Radioathionman.
I have reverted back to watching Andy of Mayberry reruns in the afternoon as opposed to news in the afternoons, recently. I never before recognized the slow incremental drip drip drip of liberalism existed even back then.
Call me crazy but that ain’t bea would be wearing a pussy hat these days.
RADIOATIONMAN
I grew up with the westerns, Have Gun, Will Travel, Trackdown, Laramie. Gunsmoke. I’m good to go.
Redacted –
You said *Get a clue, people*
Hey Sport! maybe you ought to get your own f’ing clue. You’re preaching to the choir here.
Either you’re just trolling or a blooming idiot.
Redacted – They are both BIG problems. You don’t trade one for the other.
school? hey – that lettuce isn’t going to pick itself.
BB I used to watch the Western Channel
on TV. I like scetty westerns with Van Cleef
and Eastwood.
“Judge Jackson gives Joseph some paper and sends him to another room to write about where he sees himself in five years…”
Seriously? How about back in her courtroom in 1 year for felonious assault, murder, rape or armed robbery?
Truant illegal kids? Wonder where they ever got the idea it’s ok to break the rules? Apple meet tree.
Welfare ONLY for American citizens. Problem solved.
@Redacted January 11, 2019 at 10:32 pm
(sigh)
If every corrupt Party member were imprisoned, there’d be nobody to hand the keys to.
(harrumph)
Get back to me when you’ve got a “work around” for that.
@Diana January 12, 2019 at 12:05 pm
> Welfare ONLY for American citizens. Problem solved.
YES! I’m tard uh payin’ four foreign baby mammas!